Modern capitalism and revolution - Paul Cardan

About the text
Written by Cornelius Castoriadis under the pseudonym Paul Cardan, and first published in three parts, "Le mouvement révolutionnaire sous le capitalisme moderne" in Socialisme ou Barbarie 31 (1960-61), "La signification des grèves belges" in S. ou B. 32 (1961) and "Le mouvement révolutionnaire sous le capitalisme moderne (suite)" in S. ou B. 32. (1961). Translated into English by Maurice Brinton and published by Solidarity London in 1965 as Modern Capitalism and Revolution, together with an introduction and additional English material by Brinton. This second English edition was published by Solidarity London in 1974, with a new introduction by Castoriadis.

Author’s introduction to the 1974 second English edition
When Modern Capitalism and Revolution was first drafted in 1959 its soundness or otherwise could not be vindicated on the basis of current experience. Its essential ideas, summed up in the Synopsis and in the final chapter were not a description of an overwhelming mass of empirical evidence. Nor were they an extrapolation of observations according to 'exact', established and safe scientific methods. They certainly bore a relation to actual events and trends - but this relation entailed not only a new interpretation of the 'facts', but novel decisions as to which 'facts' were relevant and which not. These decisions were equivalent to - and could only be taken by means of - a change of the traditional theoretical framework. This change, in turn, derived not so much from purely theoretical work as from a new conception of what socialism was about.

The text asserted, for instance, that the standard of living of the working class was rising and would continue to rise; that permanent unemployment did not any more, and would not in the future, have the numerical significance it bad had during the previous 150 years of capitalist development and that the capitalist state had become able to control the level of overall economic activity and to prevent major crises of overproduction. All this was certainly correct, insofar as the 1950s were concerned. But this period, taken in itself, might well have been just another phase of cyclical expansion of capitalism as the '20s had been. During such periods there always had been a rise in real wages, a decline in unemployment and an apparently triumphant ability of the ruling classes to manage their business well.

The text also asserted that the absence of political activity by the masses, in advanced capitalist countries, was the expression of a new, deep and lasting character of modern capitalism. It called the phenomenon privatisation and contended that it would form the central problem confronting the activity of revolutionaries during the coming historical period. To be sure, the population had remained politically inactive in Western countries throughout the '50s. In France, de Gaulle had come to power in 1958 amid general apathy. But periods of 'retreat' in the political activity of the masses had been the rule in capitalist history. There was nothing, empirically, forcing one to think that we were facing a new phenomenon.
Again, the text asserted that the new attitudes of youth and its revolts against various aspects of the system had nothing in common with the 'conflict of generations' observed in most societies from time immemorial; that these new attitudes expressed a total rejection of the system by the young; that established society was becoming unable to breed a new generation which would reproduce the pre-existing state of affairs - and that the revolt of youth could become an important ferment to the process of social transformation. True, in the late '50s, student demonstrations in Turkey and Korea had brought about the fall of particularly corrupt and reactionary governments - but they might have been seen 'simply' as political manifestations; after all, in less industrialised countries, students had played, for a long time, an important political role.

Finally, the text contended that narrow 'economic' and 'political' issues, in the traditional meaning of those terms, were becoming less and less relevant, and that the revolutionary movement, henceforth, ought to be concerned not with abstractions but with everything that men and women do and are subject to in present society, and first of all with the questions they face in their real everyday life. All this amounted to diagnosing the crisis of society as a crisis of its whole fabric and organisation, and of what held that fabric together, that is of meanings, motivations, responsibility and of socialisation itself. To that crisis the system tried to respond by means of an ever increasing 'consumption' and by enticing people into the 'rat race'. It was asserted that this response would not be able to take the system very far, for the emptiness and absurdity of this philosophy of just 'more and more' would sooner or later prove its own condemnation. All this might have been just a collection of 'literary', 'psychological', 'sociological' or 'philosophical' impressions and notations (correct or not, interesting or not). The real question was that of their relevance to revolutionary activity.
Fifteen years later one is entitled to state that these ideas have been amply 'confirmed by experience'. Economic developments in industrialised countries can only be understood on the basis of the conceptions defined in this text, even when new and unforeseeable factors have intervened dramatically (we devote the second part of this introduction to this point). No political activity of the masses - and in particular of the proletariat - has manifested itself, and not because opportunities have been lacking: a General Strike in Belgium in 1961, eight years of war in Vietnam for the United States, May 1968 in France, three years of social and political crisis in Italy since 1969, unprecedented chaos in Britain over the last 3 months. These have not brought about, not even fractionally, not even under the control of the traditional bureaucratic organisations, a political mobilisation of the proletariat. On the other hand, since the beginning of the '60s, the involvement and the unrest of the young in general, and more particularly of students, has been the main unsettling factor in Western societies. At the same time, traditional family relationships and the place and role of women in society have been increasingly questioned, as have the capitalist ideologies of growth and consumerism and the capitalist view of the relation between man and nature. The 'philosophical' question about the meaning of social life is becoming a 'practical' issue for an increasing number of people.

What matters beyond this 'factual confirmation' is the question of how and why it was possible to formulate these assertions before the event. What was the general conception and method allowing one to decide, within the chaos of historical and social data, what was relevant and what was not, what contained the seeds of the future and what was just a residue of the past, what corresponded to the deep concern's of living men and women, and what was only of interest to a few pseudo-theoreticians? This method and conception have been explicitly formulated in other texts, available in part to the English reader, and it is not here our purpose to outline them again.Socialisme ou Barbarie no. 35, Jan 1964, in English: Redefining Revolution Solidarity (London) 1974. ‘Marxisme et Theorie Revolutionarie’, Socialisme ou Barbarie nos 36-40 (April 1964 – June 1965), the first two parts of which have been published by Solidarity (London) under the title The Fate of Marxism and History and Revolution." href="#footnote1_87x59mo">1
Suffice it to state a general guiding principle: are relevant those facts which bear upon the revolutionary project, conceived of as a radical transformation of society brought about by the autonomous self-activity of people. It is then this self-activity - or its absence - its forms and its content, past and present, actual and potential, which becomes the central theoretical category, the archimedean point of interpretation. Divorced from this any theory, however elaborated, however subtle and however complex, is bound, sooner or later, to reveal its identity with the most basic - even if hidden - tenets of the ideology of capitalism and, more generally, of all alienated societies. These tenets are that human beings are just a particular class of objects or things, to be described, analysed and predicted by theory, and to be handled and manipulated by a 'practice' which is only a question of technique.

Given this, it isn't difficult to provide an answer to another, apparently baffling, question, namely 'how is it that the exponents and defenders of the marxist method - the self-styled 'science' of society and revolution - have proved consistently unable, whatever their particular brand of creed, to predict anything, or even to see what was happening around them? How is it that neither in 1960 nor in 1965 nor in 1970 nor today have they been able to foresee -or just to see -such increasingly massive facts of life as the continued expansion of capitalist production and its implications, the growing importance of working class struggles at the point of production concerning the conditions and organisation of work, the political 'apathy' and privatisation of people, the extent and depth of the revolt of the young, the crisis of traditional family relations, the women's movement, etc., etc., etc.? The reason is, in the first place, that their very conception makes them blind. It is not just a question of this or that particular thesis. It is the spirit of their conception, its central logical and philosophical core that is at fault for it directs their sights towards that which is irrelevant, to- wards that which can allegedly be grasped through the 'scientific' method.

Let us add that 'scientific method' is here a misnomer. A scientific attitude cannot just proceed while ignoring what is happening to its object. Marx, who certainly was not an empiricist, never stopped trying to relate his thinking to the economic, political or cultural developments of his epoch. But this is not enough. When a theory is disproved by the facts, or has to face facts which it did not and could not predict – or which it cannot interpret – it is well known that it can always be rescued, through resort to additional hypotheses, provided the sum total of these hypotheses remains logically consistent. This might work, up to a point. But beyond that the heaping of hypotheses upon hypotheses is nearly always the sign that a theory is dead.

The most famous example in the history of science is that of the 'epicycles'. During several centuries astronomers attempted to make the observed movements of the planets fit in with the view that the earth was the centre of the universe (the so-called geocentric system). In today's scientific parlance to say of a conception that it has reached the epicycles phase is to say that it no longer holds water.
But the various brands of contemporary 'marxists' are unable to do even that. Everything has to be rigidly fitted into a theory formulated 125 years ago -or, more exactly into the particular version of that theory which the particular 'marxist' in question considers the only correct one. Whatever cannot thus be forced into the preconceived framework is ignored -wholesale or in all its essentials. Thus most marxist 'interpretations' of the student revolt of May 1968 in France boil down to this: the students were struggling against the unemployment that awaited them at the end of their studies. Apart from the intrinsic stupidity of such an 'interpretation', it is worth noting how the point of substance has been made to disappear, namely the content of the struggle and of the students' demands. The students were not asking the government to provide them with a guarantee that they would find employment after graduation; they were trying to impose self-government, to abolish the traditional master-pupil relationship, to change the programmes, the methods, the direction of their studies. All this would not help them in the least subsequently to find gainful employment (indeed, within the existing system the contrary would probably be the case). It was in the forementioned specific demands that the historical importance and novelty of the students' movement lay.

In the case of economics, the privileged field of 'marxists', the situation is much worse. Thus the continued growth of capitalist production is either ignored or 'explained' by the 'production of armaments'. One wonders where to start and where to stop a discussion of this grotesque argument. To have a prima facie plausibility the argument would require that the production of armaments had been increasing and was continuing to increase in relative terms, within output as a whole. In fact, over the last quarter of a century and for the industrialised world as a whole, the contrary is true. (Relative terms are, of course, the only significant ones in considering an expanding whole. This the various 'marxist economists' are organically unable to understand. They always reason in absolute terms, which are totally void of significance. What matters in economics are proportions, rates of growth or decline, relative accelerations or decelerations, etc. What would you think of a physician who, examining an adolescent, would say: 'he is seriously ill, his arms have lengthened by 3 inches over the last six years; it must be a case of acromegaly!' – and failed to notice that, during the same period, the adolescent as a whole had grown by nearly a foot?
In the same vein we are repeatedly told that, for instance, the US military budget has increased by so many billion dollars this year -but never that it represents, possibly; a smaller proportion of the GNP than one year previously. But a declining proportion of armament expenditure ought to have increased the hypothetical difficulties of capitalism. And what is Marx's political economy talking about? Is it about use values, or about 'values' and 'commodities'? Are not armaments 'commodities'? Does the fact that we dislike them make them less of a 'commodity'? And are armaments produced out of thin air? Assume that their production is rising in either relative or absolute terms; does this not entail a more or less pari passu increase in the output of steel, of electronics, of fuels, etc. – and in the output of consumer goods for the workers producing all this?
A 'beautiful', and by no means untypical, example of the logic of contemporary 'marxists' can be found in recent attempts to vindicate the concept of a 'falling rate of profit' by pointing to the case of British capitalism over the last decade or so (are there no other countries and no other periods?) and by explaining this fall in the rate of profit by a rise in wages resulting from increased working class militancy. Let us grant the facts, the premises and the reasoning. Then how come they fail to see that this, if true, totally destroys Marx's economic theory? The basic postulate of the latter is that labour power is a commodity like any other, and that its 'value', apart from temporary fluctuations, cannot be changed through human action. It is not this or that inference but the basic concept of the system which is ruined if you accept that the level of wages (and therefore the rate of exploitation) is determined by the class struggle (as, indeed, we as6erted in this text fifteen years ago). Secondly, for Marx, the rate of exploitation must rise under capitalism. This is a much clearer and much less ambiguous consequence of his system than the 'fall in the rate of profit'. Marx has to explain, and attempts to do so in Vol. III of Capital, how it is possible for the rate of profit to fall despite a rising rate of exploitation (which, of course, in itself, would tend to raise the mass of profits and, other things being equal, the rate of profit as well). Today Marx's defenders assert that the rate of profit is falling because of a falling rate of exploitation. Stop and admire.
The general and typical attitude of a contemporary 'marxist', in this and all other fields, is the combination of a denial of reality with the assertion that tomorrow (and tomorrow there will of course be still further tomorrows) reality will at last correspond to what his theory predicts. (This, of course, implies that today it does not.) In other words, by and large, all contemporary 'marxists' assert simultaneously (implicitly or explicitly):

1. that it is untrue that output is growing, that real wages are increasing, that unemployment is showing no long-term tendency to rise, that deep depressions are absent, etc., and
2. that all these statements are true, but will cease to be true tomorrow.2

What is important in this respect is to understand how and why this type of totally irrational and anti-scientific attitude, masquerading as 'science', can prevail and still be so widespread among otherwise 'normal' human beings. This is an immense problem in itself, and a problem of cardinal significance for revolutionary action. For if people deter- mine their behaviour on the basis of beliefs which, when stripped of an endless series of rationalisations and irrelevancies, boil down to: 'I hold that p is true because I think that non-p is true', the question of how and by what process these people can ever learn from experience and become open to logical argument becomes an agonising one. We cannot enter into all this here. Suffice it to note firstly that this very fact is again a wholesale refutation of the marxist conception of history ('illusions' can well play a role in history, but not sheer irrationalities – and, then again, these illusions should be amenable to some 'rational' explanation, both of their content and of the reasons for which they hold sway over individuals). Secondly that we have here a new historical phenomenon: the adherence to a set of beliefs which cannot be defined either as an 'ideology' in the proper sense of the term (like, for instance, the 'liberal' capitalist ideology of the nineteenth-century), that is an apparently coherent system of ideas providing a 'rational justification' for the interests and the social practice of a given social stratum; or defined as a 'religion', despite the justified temptation to use this term. The 'religious' element here is in the mode of subjective adherence to the set of beliefs, the search for an unquestionable certainty and the impenetrability to logical argument. But the content of the belief itself, with its 'scientific' pretence and its lack of any reference to a transcendant principle or origin, differs substantially from what is historically known as religion. We thus have here a new type of a collective irrational belief which expresses, like all religions, the need of alienated human beings to stop thinking and searching for themselves and to locate outside themselves a source of the truth and a guarantee that time will bring about the fulfilment of their wishes. But in a period of triumphant science this need cannot be satisfied anymore by outright mythical representations like the religious ones. It thus turns, for its satisfaction, to a pseudo-rational creed. Needless to add, this complex of attitudes and beliefs is part and parcel of the established social world against which a revolutionary has to struggle – and this is no figure of speech: one sees clearly its pernicious and reactionary effects when meeting honest workers or students whose thinking has become almost inextricably confused by the mystifications propagated by the various 'marxist' sects.
It might be useful briefly to examine economic developments in the industrialised countries during the last fifteen years (and especially during the most recent part of this period), and this for two main reasons. First, because in this particular field the confusion created by traditional 'marxists' is the greatest. Secondly because recent developments clearly show not only that one is not lost amidst economic events because one has repudiated the traditional concepts and methods of analysis but, on the contrary, that this repudiation is the necessary precondition for understanding what is going on.
Capitalist growth during the 1960s
During most of the sixties economic expansion in industrialised capitalist countries continued to proceed more or less smoothly along the lines analysed in Chapters 4 and 5 of Modern Capitalism and Revolution. For the whole of the decade the volume of total output (gross national product at constant market prices) of the OECD countries combined has grown at the average compound rate of 4.8 per cent per annumNational Accounts of OECD Countries, OECD, Paris 1972, Labour Force Statistics 1959-1970, OECD, Paris 1972, the monthly Main Economic Indicators and Historical Statistics 1959-1969, OECD, Paris 1970. " href="#footnote3_zmgfx1t">3 – the rate being slightly less in the USA, higher in continental Europe, much higher in Japan. Growth of private consumers' expenditure has been roughly similar, and so has the rise in real wages. There have been minor fluctuations in the level of output (or rather in its rate of growth) and in the level of employment, but these remained extremely narrow by pre-World War II standards throughout the period (and to this very day). There has been one main exception to the general picture: the United Kingdom, for the reasons already discussed in this text in Chapters 14 and 16.
The expansion of employment
For these same countries, in the period from 1957 to 1970, the total civilian labour force rose from 264.7 million to 299.4 million, and civilian employment from 257.1 to 291.5 million. The difference between these two figures, roughly equivalent to unemployment, was 7.6 million (that is 2.87 per cent of the labour force in 1957 (a boom year), and 7.9 million, that is 2.64 per cent of the labour force in 1970 (a slack year)). During the same period employment in agriculture fell from 61.2 million in 1957 to 42.1 million in 1970. Thus the capitalist sector of the economy properly speaking absorbed, on top of the 'natural' increase of 30 million in the labour force, another 19 million released from agriculture. In other words, employment in industry and 'services' rose from 195.9 million in 1957 to 249.4 million in 1970 (27 per cent in 13 years, or roughly 2 per cent per annum). During the same period the total armed forces declined, for the aggregate of OECD countries, from 6.32 million to 5.84 million (US mobilisation for Vietnam partially offsetting French demobilisation in Algeria).
In many important countries, in fact, unemployment became negative during the period. Thus Germany still had, in 1957, some 760,000 unemployed; by the end of 1973 (and with a recession beginning) not only was the number of jobs vacant still superior to the number of unemployed, and not only had the Federal Republic absorbed some additional hundreds of thousands of refugees from Eastern Germany, but about two million immigrant foreign workers (mostly Turks, Yugoslavs and Greeks) had flown into the country and were working there. This is tantamount to saying that 'unemployment' was about minus 10 per cent of the 'German' labour force – in other words that there had been, during the period, not a redundancy but a deficiency of labour to that extent. In less impressive terms, the same situation prevailed in most other continental countries. France, in addition to absorbing over 1 million French ex-settlers from Algeria, has needed a continuous influx of immigrant labour, and is currently employing about 1.5 million foreign workers (mostly Algerian, African, Spanish, etc.). Immigrant labour is crucial for Switzerland and important in the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden. Even the USA has absorbed during this period a flux of immigrants averaging 350,000 per annum (in this case including women' and children).
The wage pressure and inflation
During the same period, however, a disruptive factor was gaining strength. This was 'inflation', or more exactly, rising prices. The rate of increase of the overall price level ('implicit price deflator of the GNP') has gone up continuously, year after year, from 2.1 per cent in 1961 to 5.9 per cent in 1970. Accidental and exceptional factors have contributed to the inflation during this or that year, in this or that country. But the universal and steady character of the phenomenon shows that these were not its main causes. The main cause has been the increasing pressure, not only of the industrial workers – though they have been the pace-setters in most cases – but of all 'wage and salary earners' for higher incomes, shorter hours of work and, to an increasing extent, changes in their conditions of work. This pressure has at times taken a more or less explosive form – for instance the long general strike in France in May-June 1968, or the 'rampant May' in Italy which has lasted for almost three years starting in 1969. This pressure was, and still is, continuously present in all industrialised countries.
Capitalist policies regarding inflation
In the prevailing conditions of fairly full employment and of buoyant overall demand, individual capitalist firms virtually have no motives (and this within quite wide limits) to resist these pressures. Increased nominal wage costs are easily compensated by higher sale prices. Profit margins are thus preserved and the value of the firm's liabilities to banks or bond-holders (in terms of the market value of the firm's product) is reduced. Neither can these pressures be effectively resisted by the capitalist governments in their role as representatives of the 'general interest' of the system.
Failure of ‘demand management’ policies
For a long period capitalist governments have tried to reduce the speed of wage and price rises through general 'demand management' policies. The profound idea behind this is that if you manage to engineer a bigger degree of unemployment, worker militancy will be reduced pro tanto through fear of unemployment, and so will wage increases. Some economists have tried to quantify this negative correlation between the level of unemployment and the speed of the wage rises, and the result has been pompously labelled 'the Phillips curve'. What is forgotten is that the influence of this demand-supply relationship on the price of labour power and marxist, is necessarily based." href="#footnote4_tju1q77">4 which was indeed operative in the 'good old days' has virtually ceased to exist.
As events have shown, the employees' pressure for higher incomes does not lessen, or lessens only very marginally, when unemployment rises within the feasible limits. On paper (that is if one extrapolated the 'curves'), working class pressure might lessen if one were able to push unemployment to fantastic proportions, say to 10 or 20 per cent of the labour force. But no capitalist government is foolish enough to try this for they know that their system would instantly explode. In other words, the decisive factor here is a secular change in the behaviour of wage and salary earners, who have come to consider as granted an increase in their real incomes year in, year out, who are not deterred from this by the usual fluctuations in demand and employment, and who would certainly no longer tolerate massive unemployment. The most clear result of all the econometric work done over the last fifteen years concerning the relation between unemployment and the rate of rise in wages is that even when unemployment is pushed up to a point corresponding to a zero real growth of output, there is still a residual and non-negligible rise in nominal wages. This means that policies tending to push up unemployment (with a view to lessening the pressure on wages) not only are not a cure, from the capitalists' point of view, but that they make things worse (for in this case the rise in wages is still there without the offsetting factor which would otherwise come from the growth in output and the increase in productivity per man-hour worked). British governments, both Tory and labour, have had a bitter experience of this.

Failure of 'incomes policies’
The other method thought up by capitalist governments and their advisers to cope with the acceleration of inflation has been the attempted introduction of 'incomes policies' – attempts which in virtually all cases have only ended in ludicrous failures. The basic reason for this is of course that incomes policies beg the question for they could only work if the workers were willing to accept that their incomes be fixed by somebody else; but if such were the case, there would have been no need for an incomes policy to begin with. Capitalist governments tend to think that if they secure the agreement of the trade union bureaucracy on a given rate of 'permissible' wage increases, they have thereby solved the problem. They are forced repeatedly to discover (and so is the management of individual firms) that agreement by the trade union bureaucracy and agreement by the workers are two quite different things.
Internal consequences of price inflation
It is well known and easily understood that price and wage rises feed on each other. Once the whole process has started it tends spontaneously to accelerate. And this creates difficult problems for the capitalist economies. For reasons alluded to above, a 'mild' degree of general inflation (say, 3 per cent per annum) is certainly favourable to capitalist expansion. A rate of inflation of between 5 and 10 per cent per annum is possibly something a capitalist economy can cope with. But how much more can it stand? There is certainly a point-though we cannot determine it in advance-beyond which a monetary economy could not function normally, for money would then cease to be a means of storing value, or even a standard for economic calculation.
International consequences of price inflation
Moreover, the process creates imbalances between different capitalist countries, or accentuates existing ones. The rate of inflation is almost certain to differ as between countries (depending on the strength of the pressure exerted by wage and salary earners and on various national characteristics such as the relative degree of imbecility of the respective governments). Thus the relative positions of different countries in relation to international trade and payments will be affected in different measure: some countries will find that they are priced out of international markets and/or that their currency is the object of periodic 'crises of confidence' among international financiers (a good example would be British exports and the tribulations of the £ sterling over the last twenty years). To this there is also a cure – at least on paper: the devaluation of the currency of the countries where inflation is strongest. But in order to work, devaluation has to be effective. This means it must succeed in reducing the overall 'consumption' of the devaluing country or – which is more or less the same – the relative 'price' of national labour power compared with that of other countries (the first being the overall supply- demand aspect of the problem, the second the cost aspect of it). Both things boil down essentially to reducing the level of real wages. And this, of course, ultimately depends on the reaction of wage and salary earners vis-a-vis the fall in their real earnings which the devaluation tends to induce (by raising prices of imported goods in terms of national currency). So we are back to square one, for that is where the problem started. Thus the relative 'success' of the dollar devaluations of December 1971 and February 1973 was essentially due to the fact that American labour by and large accepted a fall in its share of output (from 1970 to the end of 1973 'real' hourly earnings in US manufacturing – that is earnings corrected for the rise in consumer prices – rose by about 5% while industrial production increased by about 20% and output per man-hour by about 10%). The failure of successive devaluations of the pound was due to the opposite being the case in Britain.
A digression on 'expectations’

A somewhat long digression is here necessary, On top of the 'real' factors discussed up to now, so-called 'psychological' factors play a very important role in all economic matters, and particularly in matters of prices and foreign currency values. These factors introduce an additional element of unpredictability and irrationality, and their action tends to amplify disequilibrium as often as not. By the way, the term 'psychology' used by academic economists in this respect is quite misleading. The substance of the matter is, of course, that nobody can ever act, either in economic affairs or in any other, without a view about future events and situations he thinks may be relevant and have a bearing upon the outcome of his acts. These views are not, and can never be, a simple, faithful and adequate repetition or extrapolation of past experience; if they were, they would be even more 'wrong' than they usually are. Views about the future play a decisive role in decisions taken today. They therefore help to shape the future. This, of course, does not by any means imply that the future will in fact correspond to the views held about it. The effect of a number of people strongly sharing a given view about the future event may be sufficient to bring it about (as when everybody thinks that the international value of the dollar will fall and so sells dollar, thereby making it fall) or to provoke the opposite effect (as when many firms think that production of a given item is going to be extremely profitable in the future and, acting accordingly provoke an oversupply of the item in question and losses for themselves). No decision whatsoever about investments for instance can ever be made without very strong views being taken ipso facto about a future extending over a number of years.

Once the decision is taken and implemented, these views become embodied in lasting changes in the 'real world', Classic al (and Marx's) political economy was based on the old metaphysical postulate that the present is nothing but a sedimentation of the past and either discarded the influence of this factor on the economic process, or treated it implicitly as if it were only some kind of froth surrounding the 'real forces', or as if various decisions and views about the future, and the actions to which they led, could at most deviate at random around some 'normal' view and line of action (thus compensating each other on average). This 'normal’ view was considered 'rational' by the classical and neo-classical economists. For Marx, it was partly 'rational', partly 'irrational' (the 'irrationality' again being the expression of a hidden and contradictory 'rationality' at a deeper, non-conscious level).
Now this factor – labelled 'expectations' in contemporary economic literature, but for which 'projections' would be a better name – plays a decisive role in an economy such as contemporary capitalism. First, this economy exists, and can only exist, in a state of perpetual change (the only certain thing about tomorrow is that it is not going to be like today). Secondly, the monetary and financial factors have acquired an ever increasing importance in modern capitalism. The result is not that 'real' aspects are divorced from the 'financial' ones but that they are, in many instances and from many points of view, subordinated to the latter. Thus present valuations of all assets and goods (except ephemeral ones, e.g. fresh vegetables) are centrally based on projections of their future valuations. These valuations are a decisive component of decisions leading to real events. This is particularly true, of course, in relation to the relative values of currencies, and important in a period where generalised price inflation forces the decision-makers to introduce into their projections certain estimates as to the future course of relative prices. These projections thereby themselves become an important factor in the chain of the inflationary process.
The Vietnam ‘accident’ and its effects - internal...
Let us revert to our main argument. The principal characteristic of advanced capitalist economies during the sixties was a generalisation and acceleration of price inflation, resulting first and foremost from the pressure for higher wages and salaries. Against this background emerged a factor which, from the purely economic point of view, is an 'accident', or rather a constellation of 'accidents': the Vietnam war and the way various US administrations handled its economic consequences. The war in itself created a strong additional 'demand' in the US (from 1964 to 1969 US 'defence expenditure' in the national accounts sense and at current prices rose from 51.8 to 81.3 billion dollars, that is by 57%. The gross domestic product during the same period increased from 638.9 to 941.5 billion dollars, i.e. by 'only' 47%). This increased the inflationary pressures. But the problem was not unmanageable 'in itself as is shown by other historical examples. The de Gaulle government continued the Algerian war between 1958 and 1961 simultaneously with a 'stabilisation' of the French economy and a spectacular improvement in its external accounts. That the problem is manageable is also shown by the size of the figures involved: nothing miraculous is required to 'make room' for 30 billion dollars of additional expenditure on one item, during a period when total available resources are increasing by 300 billion dollars. The problem was totally 'mismanaged' by the Johnson administration because of essentially political reasons: the persistent self-delusions about a quick victory in Vietnam, and the reluctance to take unpopular taxation measures in the face of mounting internal opposition to the war.
...and International
The effect was both an acceleration of the internal price inflation in the USA and a rapid and sharp deterioration of its balance of foreign transactions. The 'net exports' of goods and services which stood at +4.5 billion dollars in 1964 had become -2.3 billion dollars in 1969. This came on top of a trend, well under way since the mid-fifties, in which Germany, Italy, Japan and France in that order successively and quite successfully re-entered world markets as competitors in the manufacture of industrial goods and started to undermine the position of US industry. But American capital did not stop, for all that, investing abroad. While such investment was a trifle in relation to the GNP and resources of the USA – of the order of 3 billion dollars per annum on the average for 'direct investment' – it was very important in relation to the size of the external balance.
Now if country A has, in a given year, a trade surplus over country B of 1 billion dollars, this can either be paid for in some acceptable form (gold, currencies, etc.) or country A can purchase assets in country B (land, buildings, mines, factories). But if country A has a deficit against country B, and on top of that purchases assets in country B, how can it pay for the total? Well, it can pay in IOUs. For how long? For as long as country B accepts the IOUs. And for how long will country B accept the IOUs? In normal business (between individuals or firms) IOUs will be accepted only as long as B thinks he has good reasons to believe that the IOUs will be honoured in due course. It is more or less like this with the international IOUs known as national currencies. It is not totally so with the dominant currency of the dominant capitalist country, this particular IOU called the dollar.
The international monetary system and the dollar standard
For various reasons connected with the whole history of Western capitalism since 1933 and particularly since 1945, the United States had succeeded in making the dollar almost legal tender among capitalist countries (and even 'socialist' ones). We cannot and need not enter here into all the complexities of the 'international monetary system'. For our purposes it is enough to point out that the two principal 'creditors' of the USA (the German and Japanese Central Banks) have in fact been willing to absorb all the IOUs, that is all the dollars that have been pouring out of the US during the 1960s5. At the end of 1960 the 'official gold and foreign exchange holdings' of the USA were 17.8 billion dollars; their 'short-term liabilities to foreigners', 17.3 billion. By the end of 1970 the first figure had fallen to 11.7 billion dollars, the second risen to 40.5 billion dollars. The increase of around 30 billion dollars in the net liabilities of the USA during the period is of the same order of magnitude as 'direct US investment abroad'.
Since 1914 virtually all countries have lived, internally, with a paper-money system. And this system has covered, since 1960, international transactions as well. For in fact, for the past 15 years or so, the capitalist world has been living in a dollar standard system, or a cours force of paper money – shrouded by the thin veil of the theoretical 'convertibility' of the dollar into gold, a veil that was torn by Nixon on August 15, 1971. This was an unthinkable situation for 'classical' and marxist political economy, for which such a system was not 'wrong' (as M. Jacques Rueff and the late General de Gaulle kept saying) but intrinsically absurd, verging on the impossible, and bound to collapse within days, weeks or months at the utmost. But this system appears as 'normal' in present conditions, for in fact modern capitalism cannot work unless it extends, on the world scale, the monetary, banking and credit functions which are the basis of its operations at the national level. This creates particular problems, for which there is neither a 'natural' solution (with gold playing the role of 'universal money', as Marx thought) nor an easy and immediate institutional solution.
Possible 'solutions' to the international monetary problem
The fantastic expansion of international trade and financial transactions of all kinds has made it impossible, for a long time now, for gold to perform the function of 'international money' – and this for roughly the same reasons which have eliminated everywhere this function of gold at the national level. This expansion of trade has required that the Central Banks of various countries behave toward each other like banks within a country, accepting each other's 'bills' (the respective currencies, or claims in such currencies) and settling their accounts through clearing and bookkeeping operations. Through a process similar to that which imposes a single actual 'money' within a given country (even before the law defines a single type of 'legal tender'), one of the currencies involved comes to play the role, first of universal instrument of payments and of a standard for prices and, subsequently, even that of a means of storing value (holding 'liquid' or quasi-liquid assets in a form which is readily usable in the international commodity and financial markets). For obvious reasons this currency will be that of the country which is 'dominant' in international trade and finance (the £ sterling up to the First World War, the dollar since the 1930s). But contrary to what is the case within a single country (where the bills of one bank, the central bank, become 'legal tender', their acceptance being enforced by law), 'independent' countries cannot be forced to accept a foreign currency against their will. Thus final net balances between countries over a given period may have to be settled through transfers of a universally accepted asset. Up to recent years gold has retained this function along with the dollar.
But not only is gold not money any longer (for instance it is not and cannot be the 'standard of prices'); gold cannot even properly perform the function of a final means of settlement as the events of the last fifteen years have shown. There are various reasons for this which we do not need to go into in detail here. Suffice it to mention the main one: in the prevailing social and political climate, no capitalist country is likely to accept to subordinate its economic policies – that is its rate of expansion and its levels of demand and employment – to the necessity of settling in gold the balance of its external transactions. It will prefer to alter, as frequently as needs be, its exchange rate. Once this starts being done systematically (that is, once the fetishism attached to the 'value of the national currency' is overcome) the 'international' function of gold becomes redundant.
On paper, it is not difficult to 'solve' the international monetary problem. A world central bank could be established to perform the role a central bank performs at the national level, regulating the activities of, and extending credit under specified conditions to the various national central banks. But obviously this would be impossible without a world political authority (it would imply that the various capitalist governments had abandoned a substantial part of their economic independence). Such an authority cannot be established 'amicably' given the strife and scramble among individual capitalist countries (the fate of the International Monetary Fund proved this, if proof were needed). A world central bank might be imposed by the dominant power as long as there was an undisputed dominant power (indeed, the International Monetary Fund, insofar as it played any effective role at all, was a mere instrument of the US Federal Reserve System up to the end of the sixties; the Russians have found things much easier within the area of their political domination). The decline in relative economic and political power of the USA in recent years and in particular the strong deterioration of their external balance has made it impossible for them to continue, let alone to strengthen, their activities as 'regulator in the last resort'.
The remaining possibility is that of a more or less 'autonomous' regulating mechanism such as the one provided by frequent changes in the relative international 'values' of currencies. At the limit this becomes a system of 'generalised floating rates'. This has its own irrationalities and problems (in particular countries for which the float leads to a continuous devaluation of their currency may have to face the internal problems discussed above in connection with straightforward devaluation), though as some international experts noted last year, the critics of the system seem to forget that there are not many alternativesEconomic Outlook, July 1973" href="#footnote6_z3y7ufw">6. The currently prevailing situation, a half-way house between the 'generalised float', the dollar standard and lingering residues of the traditional role of gold, contains even more unsettling elements.

The monetary turmoil 1969-1973...
Among these unsettling elements let us only mention the decisive role of 'expectations' or projections concerning future values of currencies (and therefore also of international values of commodities and assets). These can exert an extremely destabilising influence. This factor was already central to the sequence of events which led to the indefinite 'suspension' of the convertibility of the dollar in August 1971, and to its devaluations of December 1971 and February 1973. It had already contributed to the misfortunes of the £ sterling for many years. As long as there was 'confidence' in the dollar, not only central banks but also private banks, multinational corporations, etc., have for years been piling up dollars (holding their liquid assets in the form of dollars or short-term dollar claims). This had been done to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. When this confidence began to erode in 1969 a 'flight from the dollar' began, which rapidly fed upon itself and reached unmanageable proportions by the first half of 1971, eventually forcing the USA to abolish dollar convertibility and then to devalue.
This sequence of events, which seemed at the time to leave the capitalist economy without an international means of payments, might have triggered a general 'crisis of confidence' and led to a recession deeper than the previous ones, or even to a depression, the more so as the events of the 1971 summer came at a time when the US economy was still in a state of policy-engineered recession (1970-71) and the other industrial countries were experiencing one of their periodic decelerations in their growth rates. Indeed, in the autumn of 1971 all Stock Exchanges nose-dived. Expectations were bleak. And marxists announced again, with more emphasis than usual, that the 'last crisis' of capitalism was around the corner.
...and the 1972 -1973 boom
In fact, and despite a continuing unrest in international money affairs, one of the strongest booms in the whole history of capitalism started at about this time. The rate of growth of the GNP for all OECD countries combined rose from 3.5% in 1971 to almost 6% in 1972 and to more than 7% in 1973. Meanwhile international trade exhibited unprecedented rates of expansion. The period was also (save for a short-lived ripple from mid-1971 to the spring of 1972, mainly due to the Nixon price freeze in the US) one of fast- rising prices (for the same basic reasons as stated above), this time reinforced by an increase in food prices (mainly the result of the wonderful efficiencies of US and USSR agricultural 'policies'), and in the prices of raw materials (where the role of inflationary expectations has been important). By mid-1973 the overall price level in OECD countries combined was rising at an annual rate of 8.5% and more.7 After a while the dollar devaluations started taking effect. During 1973 the US trade balance was moving rapidly into the black. After a low point, reached in June 1973, restoration of confidence in the dollar started pushing up its international value.
By the early autumn of 1973 the prospects were that, after the exceptionally strong boom of the last two years, 1974 would be a year of slower expansion (indeed the signs of slowing down in the US, Germany and Japan were rather clear). There would be a much quieter international monetary situation, although inflation would continue more or less unabated.
The Kippur ‘accident’
Then the Kippur war exploded. Arab oil was embargoed. Oil prices quadrupled in three months. The prices of other raw materials skyrocketed. And Mr Heath, availing himself of some erroneous statistics, refused the British miners a modest pay rise.
These events confronted Western capitalism with an unprecedented threat. Here was the distinct possibility of economic disruption as a consequence of the sudden scarcity of a fundamental physical element of production (energy). This scarcity had not resulted from economic but from political factors. These factors revealed dramatically the catastrophic potential implications, which had been accumulating for a long time, of the process of capitalist (and ‘socialist') technological development. But, even short of disruption, the impact of the oil crisis could have been tremendous. Cutting dramatically the demands of some strategic sectors of capitalist production (e.g. automobile industry, aircraft, etc.) while simultaneously reducing the output possibilities of virtually all other sectors (even agriculture), the latter not being in any way a compensation for the former, the oil crisis could have annihilated business expectations, could have induced heavy primary cuts in investment as well as in consumption, and might have snow-balled into a cumulative depression combined with even steeper rises in prices. In brief, it could have led to a situation where a Napoleon cum Keynes would have felt lost and where the Nixons, Heaths, Wilsons and Pompidous would have appeared as mentally backward children required to solve the problems of unified field theory. In such a situation the traditional instruments of 'demand management', which at long last capitalist governments had painfully learned how to apply, would have been utterly useless. Measures of quasi-war economy (strict allocation of scarce resources, control of prices and wages, if not wholesale rationing, etc.) would have had to be applied, and the population made to accept them, in conditions of 'peace'.
Present prospects
At the time of writing (early March 1974) all the odds seem to be that unless social struggles develop (which is of course possible, and even more likely than, say, a year ago, but by no means inevitable) the capitalist economy will be able to re-emerge from the huge turmoil provoked by the oil crisis- superimposed upon an incipient slowing down of the business cycle, itself superimposed upon a lingering inter- national monetary crisis, itself superimposed upon a continuously accelerating inflation – at no more cost than just another recession. This recession may possibly prove no more severe than previous ones that have occurred since the end of World War 11.8
But note: we are not, absolutely not, committed either to this particular 'forecast' or to this type of forecast. There might have been (and still might be) on this occasion (or on some future one) a very deep economic crisis, or even a disruption of the capitalist economy deeper than even the most sanguine trotskyist ever dared dream about. But such a crisis would not be a confirmation, but a refutation of the whole marxist conception, economic and overall. For it would not be amenable to marxist analysis for the same reasons as the present situation is not amenable to an analysis of this type. It would not have been the outcome of those factors which the marxist conception considers operative and fundamental. In particular, it would not be the product of any 'contradiction' between the capacity of the system to 'produce surplus value' and its incapacity to 'realise surplus value', It would be the result of factors about which marxism has little or nothing to say (or which it considers secondary and peripheral in relation to the 'fundamental economic laws' of capitalism). The most important of these factors are the social struggles as basic determinants of economic developments; the political conflicts between and within the ruling strata of various countries, the necessarily half-'rational', half-'irrational' way in which capitalist governments manage the economy and decide their general policies; the world military-political game and its present stage (which conditions the ability of the rulers of a few Bedouin tribes to extract overnight a rent of about a hundred billion dollars a year from the imperialist powers. Can this be explained in terms of the 'labour theory of value' - or is it a manifestation of the 'falling rate of profit'?); and, last but not least, the intrinsic absurdity of the capitalist technological development celebrated by Marx and the marxists as Reason itself in action.
The possibility that recent international political events might have triggered an economic crisis (the occurrence, type and content of which would have been unforeseen and unforeseeable for anybody, and in particular for marxists using their 'method') amply confirms the conceptions formulated in this text. Such a crisis, had it arisen – or if it does arise – would have been an 'accident' in relation to the economy itself. It would have been the effect not of the internal working of the economy as such, but of factors external and extrinsic to the economy – and this is, since Aristotle, the very definition of an 'accident', We have stated (Chapter 15) that 'if each particular crisis may appear to be an accident, in contemporary society the existence of such accidents and their periodic recurrence are absolutely inevitable', For this society is fundamentally irrational. And this entails that there is not a single, straight, beautiful (and thus finally rational) 'dynamics of its contradictions'. This may drive to despair those who thought they had found, in three elementary economic formulae, the key to the secrets of human history. But these people, whatever they may label themselves, have never understood what the revolution is about.
For revolutionaries one central point must be grasped to understand how the system works: the struggle of human beings against their alienation, and the ensuing conflict and split in all spheres, aspects and moments of social life. As long as this struggle is there the ruling strata will continue to be unable to organise their system in a coherent way, and society will lurch from one accident to another. These are the conditions for a revolutionary activity in the present epoch - and they are amply sufficient.
Paul Cardan, March 17, 1974

Introduction to the first English edition
This small book is an attempt to describe the main features and to analyse the dynamic of modern, fully industrialised, capitalist societies from a revolutionary socialist point of view. It attempts, for the world of 1965, what Marx attempted a hundred years ago, in relation to the world around him.
What are the dominant features of modern societies? In what respect do they resemble and in what respect do they differ from the capitalist societies of the 19th century? How have they altered over the last few decades, not only in their economic structure, but in the content of their ideologies and in the function of their institutions? What are the attitudes, within them, of both rulers and ruled and what has moulded these attitudes? In what respect do these societies differ from the mental image most revolutionaries still have of them? What ensures their apparent cohesion? And what are the sources of their crises? Does their development, finally, still create the conditions of a socialist revolution?
Many of the ideas discussed will be new to those nurtured, ideologically, in the traditional left (whether 'marxist' or 'anarchist'). The main text has therefore been prefaced with a short synopsis of the argument as a whole, which is then amplified in the following chapters.
The first few chapters define the areas to be discussed. Starting from the phenomenon of political apathy (bemoaned and misunderstood by professional politicians, trade union officials, entrist Trots and the anti -bomb movement alike), Cardan seeks to document the profound changes in economic framework and prevailing ideology, brought about by the last 100 years of continuous working class struggle. The analysis is extrapolated, as the author seeks to outline the economic and political relationships which would pertain in a society of total bureaucratic capitalism.
But these early chapters go even further. They seek to clear the ideological decks, to break decisively with a method of thinking that has wrought havoc in the ranks of the 'left'. Taking Marx's profoundly true statement that 'the dominant ideas of each epoch are the ideas of its ruling class', Cardan seeks to apply this concept to Marxism itself. Marxism was not born and did not develop in a political vacuum, but in the capitalist society of the 19th century. Cardan attempts to discover what it was in traditional revolutionary theory which led (and still leads) successive generations of revolutionaries to make such absurdly false prognoses and to equate the essence of capitalism with the features of a society that capitalism had not yet sufficiently permeated and controlled. He tries to unearth the 'unmarxist' in Marx, the bourgeois kernel that has corrupted the revolutionary fruit. And whether one agrees or not with this analysis, one must concede that it is at least a serious attempt – the only serious attempt we know of – to grapple with this major theoretical problem, which most contemporary 'marxists' are either blissfully I unaware of, or prefer to ignore.
The next few chapters define, describe and analyze the bureaucratic phenomenon. They show how, starting in the process of production, bureaucratization (the organization and control of activity from the outside) gradually invades all aspects of social life, destroying the meaning of work, creating mass irresponsibility, corroding the content of politics, disrupting the channels of communication (not only between rulers and ruled, but within the ranks of both rulers and professional revolutionaries), corrupting all traditional values (including the revolutionary ones), and rendering the rational management of modern industrial societies by bureaucratic 'elites' increasingly difficult.
The book then examines the crises of bureaucratic society and discusses why the bureaucratic project is likely to fail. The bureaucratization of society is seen as preparing the ground for a libertarian resurgence, deeper in socialist content
and closer to fundamental human aspirations than any previous revolution in history. And because action is what distinguishes the conscious revolutionary from the philosopher or sociologist, the text concludes by defining some principles which should form the basis of meaningful revolutionary activity today. These are the ideas which have guided SOLIDARITY since its inception and which are now recognised as relevant by increasingly numerous people, often starting from very different premises.
There is finally an Appendix, for those whose blind (but usually uninformed) loyalty to marxist economics prevents them from seeing the world as it is. We urge these comrades to read this Appendix carefully, for it not only takes the economic analysis of state capitalism further than Marx did (or could), but it does so using Marx's own categories. Having completed this task, it then puts the whole problem where it belongs, well in the background. We have deliberately placed these comments at the very end of the book. Socialism is not fundamentally about production or about productivity. It is not even fundamentally about consumption. It is about freedom. It is about the relations between people, both in production and out of it. It is about the relation between man and his work and between man and the social institutions he creates. Control of the economy is but a means to these ends.
In a sense this book is ahead of its time. It describes phenomena which are not as yet universal, which in many places only manifest them- selves as tendencies, which do not yet apply in many areas of the world, but which in the absence of socialist revolutions will almost certainly become the dominant pattern in years to come. At first these ideas may only be accepted by a small minority. But we are confident they will make their way.
Spinoza's motto: 'neither to laugh nor to weep, but to understand’ epitomizes the purpose of the work as a whole. Some will doubtless weep – at the systematic demolition of their cherished beliefs. Others will snigger – at this attempt to challenge revolutionary Holy Writ and to rethink socialist ideology from rock bottom. We are confident however that the main message will be understood by those who have seen the inadequacy of traditional politics or those who have never been embroiled in them (there will, of course, always be those who, blinkered by their respective orthodoxies, incapable of an original thought of their own, will never understand. They will remain the repositories of revolutionary rust).
We expect the book will be denounced as revisionist. In a world where everything is changing, where every field of knowledge and of technology is being revolutionised more completely than at any other period of human history, it is necessary to run, if we are merely to keep pace. Only the 'revolutionaries' mark time. A constant ideological renewal is needed in order even to understand the world around us, let alone to grapple with it or change it. In this respect Cardan's text is unashamedly revisionist. It is revisionist in the sense that Galileo was revisionist when he asserted, against the tenets of the Church and of Aristotelian doctrine, that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not vice versa.
The text and its publishers will be labelled 'anarcho-marxist' by those who like ready-made tabs for their ideological wares. The cap fits insofar as we stand in a double line of fire, denounced as anarchists (by the marxists) and as marxists (by the anarchists). It is true insofar as we appeal to the libertarian ideals of some marxists and to the need – clearly felt by some anarchists – for a self-consistent and modern ideology going further than the slogan 'politics: out!'. Basically, however, we are ourselves and nothing more. We live here and now, not in Petrograd in 1917, nor in Barcelona in 1936. We have no gods, not even revolutionary ones. Paraphrasing Marx ('philosophers have only interpreted the world; what is necessary is to change it'), we might say that 'revolutionaries have only interpreted Marx (or Bakunin) , what is necessary is to change them.’
We are the product of the degeneration of traditional politics and of the revolt of youth against established society in an advanced industrial country in the second half of the 20th century. The aim of this book is to give both purpose and meaning to this revolt and to merge it with the constant working class struggle for its own emancipation.
SOLIDARITY (London), April 1965

Synopsis
A prolonged political apathy of the working class seems to characterise modern capitalist society. This contrasts with the activity of the masses in 'backward' countries. Since Marxism is above all a theory of proletarian revolution in advanced countries, one cannot call oneself
a marxist and remain silent on this problem. What does the modernisation of capitalism consist of? How is it linked with the political apathy of
the masses? What are the consequences of all this for the revolutionary movement today?
New and lasting features of capitalism should first be described and studied. The ruling classes have achieved greater control over the level of economic activity and have succeeded in preventing major crises of the classical type. Unemployment has greatly diminished. Over a period
of several decades real wages have been rising, both more rapidly and more regularly than in the past. This has led to an increase of mass consumption which has become indispensable to the functioning of the economy and which is by now irreversible. The unions have become integrated into the whole system of exploitation: they negotiate the docility of the workers in production in return for wage increases.
Political life is almost exclusively limited to specialists. Ordinary people are uninterested in it or frankly contemptuous of it. In no important country are there any political organizations whose members are mainly industrial workers or which is capable of mobilising the working class
on political issues. Outside of production, the proletariat no longer appears as a class with its own objectives. The entire population is drifting into a vast movement of private living. It attends to its own business. The affairs of society as a whole seem to have escaped its control. Prisoners of traditional schemas would have to conclude that there is no longer any revolutionary perspective. Traditional marxism saw the 'objective contradictions' of capitalism as essentially economic ones. The total incapacity of the system to satisfy the economic demands of the workers made of these demands the driving force of the class struggle.
Although the classical analysis corresponded to certain manifestations of capitalism, at a certain period of its development, it must be
re -examined in the light of contemporary experience. The 'objective economic contradictions' disappear with the total concentration of capital
(as in countries controlled by the Stalinist bureaucracy). But even the degree of state intervention found today in the West is sufficient to confine within narrow limits the spontaneous imbalance of the economy.
Wage levels are not determined by 'objective economic laws' but by the actions of men. The class struggle plays a crucial role in this respect. It has its own dynamic which modifies the actions and consciousness of both workers and bosses. Wage increases, provided they do not exceed increases in production, are quite feasible under capitalism.
The traditional socialist view of capitalism is also false philosophically. Objectivist and mechanistic, it eliminates the actions of men and classes from history, replacing them with an objective dynamic and 'natural' law. It makes of the proletarian revolution a simple reflex against hunger, lacking any clear connection with a socialist society. But it has even more serious implications. It sees the understanding of capitalist economy and of its crises as a task for specialised technicians (the revolutionary elite). The solution to such problems then becomes a question of economic transformations to be performed from above, needing no autonomous intervention of the proletariat. The working class is reduced to the role of infantry at the disposal of the generals. This approach is, and has been, and can only be the foundation stone of bureaucratic politics.
If the fundamental contradiction of capitalism is not to be found in the ‘anarchy of the market’ or in its ‘inability to develop the productive forces’, where is it to be found? It is in production, in the labour process itself. It is in the alienation of the workers. It lies in the necessity for capitalism on the one hand to reduce workers to simple executors of tasks, and on the other hand, in its impossibility to continue functioning if it succeeds in so doing. Capitalism needs to achieve mutually incompatible objectives: the participation and the exclusion of the worker in production – as of all citizens in relation to politics.
This is the real contradiction of contemporary society and the ultimate source of its crises. It cannot be alleviated by reforms, by increasing the standard of living or by eliminating private property and the market. It can only be eliminated by establishing collective management of production and society by the collective producers: the working class. This real contradiction within capitalism is experienced daily by the working class in the course of production. This is the only possible foundation of a socialist consciousness. It is what gives the class struggle under capitalism its universal and permanent character, whatever the level of production.
Such conceptions provide a framework for understanding the history and development of capitalist society, which is nothing else than the history and development of the class struggle. Such a dynamic is historic and not 'objective' for it constantly modifies the conditions of its own development. It modifies the adversaries them- selves. It gives rise to collective experience and collective creation. The class struggle has more and more determined the evolution of technology, production, economy and politics. It has imposed on capitalism the profound modifications of its structure which we see today.
There are few patterns of thought more 'unmarxist' than those which attempt to explain contemporary economy and politics in terms of 'laws' governing an entirely different phase of capitalist development. Equally 'unmarxist' is the assumption that these 'laws' are absolute, like the laws of gravitation, and cannot be profoundly modified by the actions of men.
At the subjective level, the modifications in capitalism appear in the accumulation of class struggle experience among the ruling classes, and in the new policies they accordingly adopt. Marxists used to regard capitalist policy as impotence, pure and simple. It was dominated by the ideology of laissez -faire, limiting the role of the state to that of a policeman. Today, however, the more far-sighted of our rulers recognize the state's potential and constantly seek to enlarge its function. They assign to their state certain objectives (such as full employment and economic development) that were once left to the spontaneous functioning of the system. The ruling class today tends to submit more and more spheres of social activity to state control; society thus becomes increasingly totalitarian.
At the objective level, the transformation of capitalism is expressed in increasing bureaucratisation. The roots of this tendency are in production, but they extend and finally invade all sectors of social life. Concentration of capital and statification are but different aspects of the same phenomenon. And in their turn they significantly modify the functioning of the economy as a whole.
Bureaucratisation implies the 'organization' and 'rationalization' of all collective activity from the outside. To the extent that it succeeds, it completes a process started by an earlier phase of capitalism: it renders all social life meaningless. It produces mass irresponsibility. Individuals begin to seek private solutions to social problems. This is the inevitable corollary of bureaucratisation.
The inherent objective, the 'ideal tendency' of bureaucratic capitalism is the construction of a totally hierarchic society in constant expansion, a sort of monstrous bureaucratic pyramid where the increasing alienation of men in labour will be 'compensated' by a steady rise in the standard of living, all initiative remaining in the hands of the organizers. Anyone who cares to look at contemporary social reality can easily recognize this tendency. It coincides with the ultimate objective of the ruling classes: to make the revolt of the exploited fail by diverting it into a personal pursuit of the standard of living, by breaking up working class solidarity through hierarchy and differentials, and by preventing all attempts at collective action from below. Conscious or not, this is the real aim of bureaucratic capitalism and the real meaning of ruling-class action.
The bureaucratic drive must fail. It cannot overcome the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, as we have defined it. In fact, bureaucratic capitalism multiplies this contradiction manyfold. The increasing bureaucratisation of all social activities only succeeds in extending into all domains the conflict inherent in the division of society into order-givers and order-takers. It scatters everywhere the intrinsic irrationality of the bureaucratic management of production.
It is for this reason that capitalism cannot avoid crises (that is periodic breakdowns in the normal functioning of society), which vary in kind and stem from very different immediate causes. The inherent irrationality of capitalism remains but now finds expression in new and different ways.
Only the class struggle can give the contradictions and crises of modern society a revolutionary character. The present situation is peculiar in this respect. In production the struggle shows an intensity formerly unknown. It tends to raise the question of who will manage production, and this in the most advanced countries. But outside of production the class struggle hardly shows itself at all, or only distorted by bureaucratic organizations. This political apathy of the working class has a dual significance. On the one hand it represents a victory of capitalism. The bureaucratisation of their organizations drives the workers away from collective political action. The collapse of traditional ideology and the absence of a socialist programme prevent workers from generalising their critique of production and of transforming it into a positive conception of a new society. The philosophy of consumption penetrates the proletariat. But this apathy also has potentially positive aspects. Working-class experience of the new phase of capitalism could lead it to a criticism of all aspects of contemporary life, a criticism far more profound than anything attempted in the past. And from this could arise a renewal of the socialist ideal in the proletariat, at a much higher level than witnessed hitherto.
The 'ripening' of the conditions of socialism continues. This does not mean a purely objective 'ripening' (increase of the productive forces, increased centralisation, increasing ‘contradictions’). Nor does it mean a purely subjective 'ripening' (accumulation of experience in the proletariat). It means the accumulation of the objective conditions of an adequate consciousness. The proletariat could not eliminate reformism and bureaucratism before having produced them as social realities and experienced them in everyday life. Today, large numbers of people can grasp as profoundly real and relevant the idea of workers' management of production, and can reject as inadequate the capitalist values that see production and consumption as ends in themselves.
This new type of analysis will demand profound changes of the revolutionary movement. Its criticism of society, which is essential to help workers to evaluate and generalise their everyday direct experience, must be completely re-oriented. It should seek to describe and analyse the contradictions and the irrationality of the bureaucratic management of society at all its levels. It should denounce the inhuman and absurd character of contemporary work, the alienation of people. in consumption and leisure. It should expose the arbitrariness and the monstrosity of the hierarchical organization of production and of contemporary relations between men.
The central element of its programme of demands should be the struggle around the organization of labour and life in the factory. It should oppose everything which tends to divide workers (wage differentials, piecework, etc.) But it should do more. Under modern capitalism, the essential problem is how to pass from the struggle at factory level to struggle against the whole pattern of society. The revolutionary movement will only succeed in this respect if it ruthlessly denounces all equivocations and double -talk on the idea of socialism, if it mercilessly criticizes the values of contemporary society, if it presents the socialist programme to the proletariat for what it really is: a programme for the humanisation of labour and of society.
The revolutionary movement will only be able to fulfill these tasks if it ceases to appear as a traditional political movement (traditional politics are dead) and if it becomes a total movement, concerned with all that men do in society, and with their real daily lives.

Part I – Traditional Marxism and Contemporary Reality
The Problem Stated
Perhaps the most striking phenomenon of our times is the contrast between industrialised and underdeveloped countries, as regards the attitude of the population towards politics.
For nearly twenty years now, the political life of the 'advanced' countries has taken place with the masses in absentia. In France, the Algerian war went on for eight years, and the Fourth Republic collapsed, amidst general apathy. In Britain, only a small fraction of the hundreds
of thousands of people who make up the member- ship of the Labour Party show any interest in such discussions as there are of the Party's 'programme'. In Germany, political life was confined for some fifteen years to the whims of an old man and to intrigues about the succession - and Erhardt's succession to the Chancellorship has hardly aroused the political passions of the masses. In the United States politicians and sociologists bemoan the political indifference of the population: The Power Elite (New York, 1956). Also Adlai Stevenson in Foreign Affairs (January 1961 issue)." href="#footnote9_5iekd8z">9the movement of the Negroes for racial equality has not succeeded until now, despite its violent outbursts, in enlisting support from more than marginal strata of the white population. It is hardly necessary to evoke the 'political life' of the Scandinavian countries, of Holland, of Switzerland, or of the rich Commonwealth countries.
One has to leave the 'civilized' world to find instances where in recent years men have tried to shape their lives through their own collective action. There was Cuba, where peasant partisans overthrew a long-established dictatorship which was supported by the United States. There was Algeria. There is South Africa, where illiterate natives have repeatedly mobilized collectively and improvised new forms of struggle. There is
South Korea, where the dictatorship of Syngman Rhee, an instrument of the United States, collapsed after huge popular demonstrations in which students and other young people played a leading part.
Must one conclude that, henceforth, mass political activity is a phenomenon confined to 'backward' countries? Are peasants, students
and the oppressed races in colonial countries the only social groups capable of acting to change their fate? Is the interest of people in politics proportional to their economic and cultural backwardness? Does modern industrial civilization mean that the destiny of society no longer interests the members of that society? What is the basis of this attitude of the population in general and of the working class in particular? In the countries of classic capitalism what are the roots of this apathy. of this indifference to traditional politics. of this process of 'depolitization'?
Before attempting to answer these questions f we must stress the general character of the phenomena we are discussing. The countries concerned – and to which we refer in this text when we speak of modern capitalist countries – are those in which pre -capitalist elements in the economy and in general social organization have largely been eliminated. These are the only countries that count when one is discussing capitalist society (and not the problems involved in the transition from earlier forms of social organization to capitalism). These countries are the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Great Britain, West Germany, Holland, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, recently joined by France and now being joined by Italy and Japan: in all, countries whose total population is about 600 millions, and in which are concentrated 75% of the total production of the 'capitalist world' and 90% of its industrial production. These are the countries in which work and live the enormous majority of the modern proletariat. Of the countries of the 'Eastern bloc', those which have more or less completed their industrialization (such as Russia. Czechoslovakia and East Germany) confront a fundamentally similar situation.
The great bulk of humanity lives, of course, outside of this type of social regime. This includes the enormous majority of the population of the 'capitalist world' (1,500 million as against the forementioned 600 million) as well as the vast majority of the population of the 'Eastern bloc' (830 million as against 250 million). But marxism was a theory of revolution in capitalist countries, not in backward, predominantly peasant communities. If marxists now look for the roots of the socialist revolution in the colonial countries and if they now search for the contradictions of capitalism in the opposition between the industrialized West and the underdeveloped countries – or even in the struggle between the two blocs – they are hardly 'marxists' any longer. For marxism was, or wished to be, a theory of socialist revolution made by the proletariat, not a theory of the revolution of African peasants or of land–hungry agricultural labourers in Southern Italy. Marxism was not a theory of revolution based on the pre -capitalist residues in national or world society. It was the ideological expression of the mass activity of the working class, itself the product of capitalism and of industrialization. Nobody, of course, can deny the immense importance of the backward countries. But the fate of the modern world will not finally be decided in Leopoldville – nor even in Peking – but in Pittsburgh, in Detroit, in the industrial belt of Paris, in the Midlands, on Clydeside, in the Ruhr, in Moscow and in Stalingrad. No one can call himself a marxist or even a revolutionary socialist if he evades the question: what has become today of the proletariat as a revolutionary class? What has become of it in the countries where it really exists?
We know quite well that the earth is round and that the problem of the fate of society can only be solved on an international basis. Day after day we are confronted with the struggles of those two-thirds of humanity who live in non-industrialized countries. Their fate, the relations between these countries and the industrialized ones and, at a still deeper level, the types of society that are emerging on a world-wide scale, are all certainly most important questions. But for revolutionaries who live in modern capitalist countries, the first task should be to understand the society around them and the fate of the working class bred in that society. This is necessary not as an abstract exercise of sociological analysis but the better to take a meaningful stand in relation to real problems. This analysis is objectively our primary task, because the social relations of modern capitalism increasingly tend to dominate the world and to mould the evolution of the more 'backward' countries. It is also the primary task for us because we are nothing unless we can define ourselves, both in theory and in practice, in relation to our own environment.
What therefore is modern capitalism? What has become of the working class in the countries of modern capitalism? This essay is an attempt to answer these questions. In the course of our analysis we shall describe the modifications that have taken place in the functioning of capitalism. We shall look at what makes it different both from the capitalism of the classical period and (what is almost as important) from the image traditional marxists had – and still have – of its mechanisms. We shall then attempt to show the link between the modernization of capitalism and the depolitization of the masses. We shall finally attempt to answer the main question: what can and must be the basis of revolutionary politics in the present period.
Some Important Features of Modern Capitalism

To start, we will describe a number of new phenomena (either new in themselves or new to traditional marxist theory). We will attempt to explain them later on.

1. CAPITALISM HAS SUCCEEDED SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN CONTROLLING THE LEVEL OF ECONOMIC ACTIVITY TO A VERY CONSIDERABLE DEGREE. Fluctuations of supply and demand are maintained within narrow limits. There have been profound modifications in the economy itself and in its relations with the state. The result is that depressions of the pre-war type are now virtually excluded.
   Why have the spontaneous fluctuations of economic activity been so markedly reduced?
   First, because the various components of global social demand have become much more stable:
   1. Regular wage increases, the introduction in many countries of unemployment and National Assistance benefits, the increasing number of wage-earners paid on a monthly basis have all helped limit wide swings in the demand for consumer goods (and have thereby also limited swings in the production of these goods). They have greatly lessened the cumulative effects which downward trends in demand used to have in the past.
   2. There is a continuous and irreversible / increase in state expenditure, which has become a major component of total demand. In modern capitalist countries, state consumption today results in a stable demand which absorbs 20-25% of the total social product. If one adds to this unemployment and assistance benefits paid by the government, the expenditure of semi-governmental institutions, and the funds which 'pass through' the state, the ‘public sector' of the economy will be found, in various 'Western' countries, to manipulate (directly or indirectly) between 40 and 50% of the total social product.10
   3. The rate of capitalist accumulation, whose fluctuations were mainly responsible for economic instability in the past, varies much less than it used to. Investments tend to become more massive (for instance hydroelectric plants and nuclear power stations). They tend to be spread over longer periods. Rapid and constant technological progress compels enterprises to invest in a much more continuous fashion. Increasing investment results in expansion. And continuous expansion justifies, in the eyes of the capitalists, a policy of constantly increasing investment. Expansion, so to speak, ratifies the whole policy, after the event.

   Second, because the continuous, conscious intervention of the capitalist state to maintain economic expansion lessens the likelihood of massive depressions.
   Capitalist states have now been obliged publicly to assume responsibility for providing relatively full employment, and for eliminating major depressions. This they have more or less succeeded in doing, even if they cannot avoid phases of recession and inflation in the economy, let alone assuring its optimum, rational development. The situation of 1933 – which would correspond today to 20 million unemployed in the USA alone – is henceforth inconceivable. It would provoke an immediate explosion of the system. Neither workers nor capitalists would tolerate it.
   The instruments which allow the capitalist state to maintain economic fluctuations within fairly narrow limits are its constant and many-sided intervention in economic life, and the enormous proportion of the social product which it now manipulates and controls, either directly or indirectly.

2. DESPITE LOCAL POCKETS OF UNEMPLOYMENT, THE NUMERICAL IMPORTANCE OF UNEMPLOYMENT ON A NATIONAL SCALE (we do not speak here of its human importance)11 HAS DIMINISHED CONSIDERABLY COMPARED WITH PRE-WAR YEARS.
   In practically all industrialized European countries, the percentage of unemployed has remained very low since the end of the war, fluctuating between 1% and 2% of the labour force. In Britain, where the swings have been largest the average annual percentage of unemployed did not exceed 2.3% (in 1959). It reached between 3% and 4% in the first quarter of 1963, but by the end of the year it was running again around 2%. Western Germany absorbed a number of unemployed exceeding 1.5 million in 1950, and an influx of refugees of about 200,000 a year. Since 1960, unemployment in that country has remained below 1%. In France, unemployment has never exceeded 1% of the labour force. Italy and Japan – countries where industrialization was far from complete in the early post-war period – not only absorbed a huge number of agricultural workers into industry. but brought their unemployment down from 9.4% in 1955 to 3% in 1962 (in the case of Italy), and, in the case of Japan, to as low as 0.9% in 1962. In Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands the percentage has never exceeded 2.6% since 1954 (and is currently much lower).
   Even in the United States, where the economic policies of the Eisenhower administration created virtual stagnation for 8 years, and where the full impact of rapidly advancing automation is felt, unemployment averaged 4.6% between 1946 and 1962, with a peak of 6.8% in 1958. This compares with pre-war oscillations of the unemployment rate in the USA of between 3.3% (in the 'boom' year 1929) and 25% (in 1933). The unemployment rate was still 10% in 1940, a year of ‘full recovery’ and war preparations.12With a few local exceptions there has been little technological unemployment, despite enormous technological change. As we shall later show, automation need not create unemployment under a system of complete bureaucratic capitalism.13
3. AVERAGE REAL EARNINGS HAVE RISEN OVER A LONG PERIOD.
   Increases in real wages have not only been more rapid but much more regular14 than in preceding periods of capitalism.OECD General Statistics

, July 1964, p. 121). In these calculations, ‘earnings’ include bonus, cost of living allowances and taxes and contributions payable by the employed person. They represent the average hourly earnings, inclusive of overtime, calculated over a whole working week. Of course a big part of this rise in wages was eroded by the rising cost of living. The consumer price index rose during the same period by 61.7% - or 4.1% per annum compound (ibid.). This gives the average annual growth of earnings in real terms at 2.5% (compound). This is rather lower than the corresponding rates for industrial continental countries. Furthermore, we are not saying that the process is an even one. In Britain, in 1964, for instance, there were still 10% of male adult workers earning less than £12 per week. " href="#footnote15_gpz7h2a">15 This is first and foremost the result of over a century of working class struggle – of general and organized struggles, as well as of 'informal' struggles within a factory or shop. In more general terms it is the result of the constant pressure exercised by the workers in every country and at all times.
The employers have resorted to a new policy which we can see applied by an increasing number of enterprises. One can sum it up as follows:
to give in, when and where necessary, on wages; to anticipate demands, if needs be, in order to avoid conflicts; to make up for this by stepping up output per man-hour; to associate the unions as much as possible with this policy; to integrate, wherever possible, the workers into the work process by various manoeuvres and arrangements, such as providing various 'advantages' for those who will 'cooperate'.
Neither economic claims, in the narrow sense (i.e. those leading to wage increases) nor even demands leading to a reduction in hours appear any longer (either to wage earners or to capitalists) impossible to satisfy without over- throwing the whole social system. An annual increase in wages of about 3% (6/ - in £ 10) is now considered 'normal' by workers and bosses alike (of course by the workers as a minimum, by the bosses as a maximum). Government boasts about fulfilled growth targets often provide the unions with a basis for wage claims which the employers find difficult to resist. Capitalism can achieve this compromise in the division of the social product provided the rate of wage increases is approximately compensated by equivalent increases of productivity, thus leaving the existing division of the social product more or less intact.
If one looks at the distribution of the national product in the U. K. over the last quarter of a century some interesting facts emerge. Excluding the pay of the Armed Forces, income from employment (wages, salaries and employers' contributions to National Insurance, etc.) rose from £2,956 million in 1938 to £7,375 million in 1950, and to £ 16,673 million in 1962 (National Income and Expenditure, 1963, Table 2, pp. 3 -4). A s the national income rose during the same period from £ 4,816 million to £ 10,701 million and to £ 22, 631 million respectively (ibid., Table 1, pp. 2-3), it will be seen that the proportion of the national income represented by 'labour income' increased from 61.4% in 1938 to 68.9% in 1950 and further to 73.7% in 1962. This partly reflects the increase in the proportion, within the total labour force, of those dependently employed (i.e. the further shrinking of 'self-employment' in agriculture, small trade, etc.). But there can be no doubt as to the fact that the labour share did not fall. Labour's income has risen at least pari passu with the value of total output.pari passu with output. As will be explained later in the text, they are bound to." href="#footnote16_70g7tw4">16

(New York, 1956)." href="#footnote19_m00tozq">19 People are uninterested in politics, not only during 'normal' times, but also during periods which the political specialists consider 'periods of crisis'. At best the population participates in the political election game every five years or so in a cynical and disillusioned way.
There are no longer any working class political organizations, by which we mean organizations either expressing the real interests of the working class or even composed – at their decision-taking levels – of a majority of workers. Parties such as the British Labour Party or the French or Italian Communist Parties may enjoy the electoral support of the working class. But this in itself is not a sufficient criterion for them
to be considered working class parties (after all the Liberal Party in Britain once enjoyed the same kind of support – and the Democratic Party
in the USA still does – without this making 'proletarian parties' of them!).
What pass as 'working class political organizations' are outfits composed – at their policy- making levels – of ex-workers (long removed from the realities of production and now part and parcel of the apparatus), of perennial party professionals, of trade union officials, of middle class functionaries and technocrats of one kind or another, of more or less 'sincere' intellectuals with perhaps a smattering of 'progressive' businessmen. Although these organizations still occasionally talk about the working class, their aims can hardly be identified any longer with the total emancipation of labour from all forms of exploitation and mystification. We will return later to what their real objectives are.
The majority of workers may vote (or not vote) for this kind of party. But the fact remains that today there doesn't exist, in any important capitalist country, any important political organization capable of mobilizing any significant proportion of workers on political problems (even if by 'significant' we mean a proportion as low as 10 to 15%).
All this is intimately connected with the degeneration and bureaucratization of the working class organizations. a process which has made them indistinguishable from bourgeois political groups. This process is itself related to the whole evolution of capitalism which we have just described.

The Revolutionary Perspective in Traditional Marxism
Those whom we shall call traditional marxists refuse to face up to these facts. Some will concede that changes have taken place in contemporary capitalism, but they don't really understand what it is that has changed. They don't grasp the real meaning of the altered attitudes and activities of social classes, particularly of the working class. For them the central problem, what we call 'privatization' simply does not exist.
Or if they do recognize this political 'apathy' they believe it temporary, transitional, the result of a terrible defeat, etc. The magic of words is
thus used to mask the reality of facts. One may hear, for example, that the lack of interest of French workers in politics needs no special explanation. It is the result of a retreat, after a serious defeat. What defeat? For a defeat, you need a battle. And the outstanding fact about de Gaulle's coming to power is that it took place without a battle. Others put forward a more sophisticated argument: the defeat lies in the fact of not having fought. But for anyone who thinks, it should be clear that the refusal to do battle, in May 1958, itself expressed this apathy, this 'depolitization' of the masses. The 'explanation' therefore pre -supposes these very things it should be explaining. It is equally clear that no 'defeat'
is at the origin of the political apathy of the British, American, German or Scandinavian workers.
Traditional marxists also remain silent on the more general questions. Have the objective modifications of capitalism any relation to the attitude of men in society? If this is a transitional state of affairs, what is meant by the word, 'transitional'? This fleeting moment, as well as the very existence of our solar system, are both 'transitional'. Most important of all, none of the traditional marxists attempt to answer the basic question: how can and should revolutionaries act so that the present situation (whether 'transitional' or not) can be overcome? Others in the marxist movement simply refuse to recognize the transformations of capitalism. They patiently wait for the next great slump. They continue to speak of the pauperisation of the proletariat. They denounce the increase of capitalist profits (while at the same time trying to demonstrate the historic fall in the rate of profit!). This attitude is more logical. For one, it refuses to recognize anything in the external world which annoys it, or which does not conform to 'classical' conceptions. Madness is less open to attack the more systematized and complete it is. Moreover, those thus afflicted are at least trying to salvage what for a century has passed (wrongly passed, we believe) as the foundation stone of a revolutionary policy and perspective.
For those who think in terms of traditional marxism, the transformations of capitalism we have described imply that any kind of revolutionary perspective is utopian.The Imitation of Christ or in The Lives of the Saints than in the Gospels, St. Clement of Alexandria or St. Augustine. Similarly, the historical reality of marxism, the ideology that in fact moulded millions of militants, is to be found in thousands of pamphlets and newspaper articles, in Kautsky's great works of vulgarization, in The Student's Marx by Edward Aveling, in Bukharin's ABC of Communism, in the Karl Marx of Lenin – even in some of John Strachey's earlier works such as The Nature of the Capitalist Crisis and Theory and Practice of Socialism. It is NOT to be found in Capital, which very few people have read, and still less in the manuscripts of Marx's youth, published for the first time in 1925. This practical ideology of marxism, despite its schematization and over- simplification, follows faithfully enough one side of the work of Marx, which gradually became the most important one, even in the eyes of Marx himself. We will examine this process of selection later on, when we comment on Marx's Capital." href="#footnote20_wqqspyp">20 For on what was this perspective based, in the minds of traditional marxists? It was based on the 'objective contradictions of capitalist economy' and on the total incapacity of the system to satisfy the economic demands of the workers.
In traditional marxism there is no systematic and explicit answer to the question: what leads the working class to political activity of a kind that can transform society?What Is To Be Done is well known. The proletariat only enters socialist political activity under the influence of propaganda made by petty bourgeois intellectuals. By itself the working class can only develop a trade union consciousness. Later, Lenin was to modify this view. As for Trotsky, in his In Defence of Marxism, he defines scientific socialism as 'the conscious expression of the elemental and instinctive drive of the proletariat to reconstruct society on communist foundations'. A beautiful phrase... but one which obscures the problem by applying metaphorical terms (such as 'elemental' and 'instinctive') to what are, in the proletariat, products of historical development and struggle." href="#footnote21_0jihcqq">21
But for over a century the practice of the socialist movement clearly shows the kind of answer marxists have had in mind. To be sure, immortal quotations viewing the proletarian condition as a total condition of existence can be found. But in current theory, as well as in daily practice, political consciousness was seen as arising from the economic condition of the wage earner, from his exploitation as a seller of labour power, from his expropriation from part of the social product.
On the theoretical level, attention was therefore focused on the 'objective contradictions' of the system. The 'inescapable economic mechanisms' of capitalism would inexorably lead the system to periodic economic crises and would perhaps even lead to its final collapse. At the same time these mechanisms made the satisfaction of workers' demands (as consumers) impossible. They provoked wage reductions or wiped out wage increases. They periodically created mass unemployment. They constantly threatened the worker with being thrown into the industrial reserve army.
On the practical level economic questions therefore provided the basis of propaganda in the socialist press and of socialist agitation. There quite naturally followed the great importance given to work in the unions: first to their creation, later to their infiltration by revolutionaries. Briefly, capitalist exploitation forced the workers to put forward economic claims whose satisfaction was impossible within the established system; the experience and consciousness of this impossibility would lead the workers to political activity aimed at overthrowing the system. The 'laws' of capitalist economy would produce crises (periodic breakdowns in the organization of society) which would permit the proletariat to intervene en masse, to impose its own solutions.
These ideas and the practices flowing from them undoubtedly corresponded to real aspects of the development of capitalism and of the activity of the working class. Between the beginning of the 19th century and the Second World War the abse