The Class Struggle

Jacob Richter · #1 14th June 2008, 05:36

The Class Struggle (Erfurt Programme) by Karl Kautsky (1892)

How shall the study of this be conducted? By paragraph? By chapter section?

Niccolò Rossi · #2 14th June 2008, 06:26

I think by sub-chapter would be the best method. That way it progresses at a stable pace. Not to slow to kill the thread, not to fast to have people ignore it.

Good luck Jacob, hopefully this will be one of the few study guides that will get off the ground and keep momentum. However, you might have a tough time with interest, I'm sure you'll get many who'll brush it off immediately because it's Kautsky.

Jacob Richter · #3 14th June 2008, 14:42

Before getting on with The Class Struggle, it is best to read it alongside:

1) The Erfurt Program; and
2) A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891 by Frederick Engels.

Quote:

The program adopted by the German Social Democracy at Erfurt in 1891 divides itself into two parts. In the first place it outlines the fundamental principles on which Socialism is based, and in the second it enumerates the demands which the Social Democracy makes of present day society. The first part tells what Socialists believe; the second how they propose to make their belief effective.

This all-important paragraph is key to understanding the minimum program the right way. I posted an article rebutting "transitional" opponents of the minimum program here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.p...1&postcount=28

Indeed, the Erfurt Program itself says:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Erfurt Program

Proceeding from these principles, the German Social Democratic Party demands, first of all

After stressing this, Kautsky quotes extensively from the Erfurt Program. The remark that follows:

Quote:

Many a man thinks he has given proof of wisdom when he says, “There is nothing new under the sun.” There is nothing more false. Modern science shows that nothing is stationary, that in society, just as in external nature, a continuous development is discoverable.

Hehehe. The phrase "nothing new under the sun" comes from the Hebrew Bible, specifically from "The Gatherer" / "The Teacher" (obscured by the Greek rendition known today as "Ecclesiastes"

).

The author then goes on to briefly mention the history of economic development, not mentioning pre-capitalist production in Marxist language (slave, feudal, etc.).

Quote:

So long as labor was performed with comparatively simple tools which each laborer could possess, it went without saying that he owned the product of his toil. But as the means of production have changed, this notion of property right has passed away.

This goes right back to what Engels said in 1847, in The Principles of Communism about the division of labour:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Engels

Labor was more and more divided among the individual workers so that the worker who previously had done a complete piece of work now did only a part of that piece. This division of labor made it possible to produce things faster and cheaper. It reduced the activity of the individual worker to simple, endlessly repeated mechanical motions which could be performed not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell, one after another, under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning and weaving had already done.

But at the same time, they also fell into the hands of big capitalists, and their workers were deprived of whatever independence remained to them. Gradually, not only genuine manufacture but also handicrafts came within the province of the factory system as big capitalists increasingly displaced the small master craftsmen by setting up huge workshops, which saved many expenses and permitted an elaborate division of labor.

Jacob Richter · #4 23rd June 2008, 19:30

The next section is basically a history lesson of sorts, how agriculture and handicraft helped create modern capitalism.

Quote:

The original form of capital is merchant’s capital. Almost equally old is interest-bearing capital, the profits of which are in the form of interest. As soon as these forms of capital have been developed, private property becomes something quite different from what it was in the beginning. Defenders of the present system try to distract attention from this aspect of property by talking constantly of the forms necessary to the beginnings of society. They attempt to prevent our seeing any difference between the ownership of a home and the ownership of a branch of industry.

Ah yes, the old "possessions vs. property" debate...

Quote:

Private property in the means of production was once necessary to the good of society; there was a time when the average man had a chance to own property. This condition of affairs, they would have us believe, still exists. But in reality the nature of private property has changed. The old conditions have passed away absolutely. How this came about we are now to see.

The "American Dream" for all...

Jacob Richter · #5 30th June 2008, 04:11

The next section, The Capitalist Method of Production, continues with the history lessons, so I'll quote and comment on the important parts.

Quote:

At the same time there came into being the modern state, the centralized official and military state, at first an absolute monarchy. This state met the demands of the rising capitalist class and depended on it for support. The modern state, the state of developed commodity production, draws its power, not from personal service, but from its financial income. The monarchs had, therefore, every reason to protect and favor the capitalists who brought money into the country. In return the capitalists lent money to the monarchs, made debtors of them and put them in the position of dependents. This enabled them more and more to force the political and military power into their service. The state was obliged to improve means of communication, take over colonies and carry on wars in the interest of capital.

As opposed to the "Asiatic mode of production," the European "feudal mode of production" was notable for political decentralization. The most impressive example of a nation-state emerging is the French example, with the Sun King Louis XIV benefitting from the earlier efforts of Cardinal Richelieu.

Quote:

Our text-books on economics tell us that the beginning of capital is to be found in thrift. But we have learned that its origin was an altogether different one. Colonial policies were the chief sources of wealth open to capitalist nations; i.e., capital was drawn from plundering of foreign lands, from piracy, smuggling, slave-trading and war. Even down into the nineteenth century history shows us plenty of examples of this “thrift.” And “thrifty” trades-people found in the state itself a powerful ally in this sort of “saving.”

...

Thus the foundations of capitalist industry were laid by means of expropriation, by means of a revolution as bloody as any in history.

The separation of great masses of workers from the means of production, their transformation into propertyless proletarians, was a condition necessary to capitalist production. Economic development made the change inevitable. But the rising classes were not content to sit by and watch the course of events; they resorted to violence to accelerate the change. It was through violence of the most brutal, repulsive kind that capitalist society was ushered in.

Kautsky here recalls Marx's "in the beginning tale" of primitive accumulation.

Jacob Richter · #6 18th July 2008, 21:45

Before I continue, I would like to note that, surprisingly, there is an online German edition that is not a "bowdlerised abridgement":

http://marxists.architexturez.net/de...rter/index.htm

Jacob Richter · #7 26th July 2008, 20:18

The last section of Chapter 1 is rather brief. It outlines the formation of factories and says more about the division of labour inside the factories:

Quote:

As soon as workers produced together in a factory, it was discovered that a division of labor increased the profits. Gradually systems of production became so developed that each operative had to make but a single motion or perform a single operation. That is, the laborer had been reduced to the level of a machine. Only one step remained – to replace him with a machine, and that step was soon taken.

Jacob Richter · #8 5th August 2008, 00:34

The first section of Chapter 2 is a bit lengthy, so I'll quote the key paragraphs:

Quote:

Originally it took forcible methods to secure the supply of proletarians necessary to this system. Today, however, such methods are no longer necessary. The economic power of the system has become sufficient to accomplish the desired result without breaking the law of private property. In fact, it is by the operation of this law that every year a sufficient number of farmers and independent craftsmen are given the choice between starvation and work in the factories.

The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs has repeated this process in the Third World, thereby contributing to the fact that, in the next paragraph, "the number of the proletariat is steadily on the increase."

Quote:

The capitalist form of production has overthrown all others, and become the dominant one in the field of industry; similarly wage-labor is today the dominant form of labor. A hundred years ago the farming peasantry took the first place; later, the small city industrialists; today it is the wage-earner.

The foundation of capitalism is not the consumer goods and services market, but rather the wage-labour market.

The rest of the chapter section describes the misery of the Industrial Revolution proletarian. However:

Quote:

In other words, the capitalist application of the system of machinery is a spur that drives the capitalist to extend the hours of labor as much as possible, to carry on production without interruption, to introduce the system of night and day shifts, and, accordingly, to make of the unwholesome night work a permanent system.

This "unwholesome night work" has become a feature of many service jobs today in the form of the graveyard shift.

Jacob Richter · #9 18th August 2008, 04:01

In the next section, Kautsky discusses the foundation of ANY capitalist system: wage labour. Here he states the obvious, even the "profoundly true and important" (to quote Lenin) anti-Third-Worldist position that "exploitation must be great even where wages are high."

Quote:

They must always be below that, so as to leave a surplus; it is only the prospect of a surplus that moves the capitalist to purchase labor power. It is therefore evident that under the capitalist system the wages of the workmen can never rise high enough to put an end to the exploitation of labor.

It is a shame, however, that he does not address the circulation of money as being the primary enabler of wage labour.

The rest of the section, while applicable to the Third World, is historical from a First World POV, since he hints at the absolute and not relative immiseration of the working class.

Jacob Richter · #10 1st September 2008, 17:49

On the very short but "profoundly true and important" section regarding family:

Quote:

The participation of women in industrial pursuits means the total destruction of the family life of the working-man without substituting for it a higher form of the family relation. The capitalist system of production does not in most cases destroy the single household of the working-man, but robs it of all but its unpleasant features. The activity of women today in industrial pursuits does not mean to her freedom from household duties; it means an increase of her former burdens by a new one. But one cannot serve two masters. The household of the working-man suffers whenever his wife must help to earn the daily bread. Present society offers, in the place of the individual household which it destroys, only miserable substitutes; soup-houses and day-nurseries, where crumbs of the physical and mental sustenance of the rich are cast to the lower classes.

I remember reading somewhere, just this past month, about studies showing indeed that women work more when married. CPGB comrade Mike Macnair also gave a monetary figure in terms of free labour given to men (I can't remember which of the two videos):

http://csukblog.wordpress.com/2008/0...versity-north/

I don't know what to make of this last part, though:

Quote:

Many a slave-holder has in former times torn husband from wife and parents from children, but the capitalists have improved upon the abominations of slavery; they tear the infant from the breast of its mother and compel her to entrust it to strangers’ hands. And yet a society in which hundreds of thousands of such instances are a daily occurrence, a society whose upper classes promote “benevolent” institutions for the purpose of making easy the separation of the mothers from their babies, such a society has the effrontery to accuse the Socialists of trying to abolish the family, because they, basing their opinion on the fact that the family has ever been one of the reflexes of the system of production, foresee that further changes in that system must also result in a more perfect family relationship.

Jacob Richter · #11 5th October 2008, 06:10

Sorry for the long wait, but here goes with the next section on "the world's oldest profession."

Although criticizing modern social-conservative hypocrisy, what is missing in this section is something beyond "At one time, however, prostitutes were a middle class between beggars and thieves; they were then an article of luxury in which society indulged but the loss of which would in no way have endangered its existence." What about the sex-rite prostitutes (for all intents and purposes) of antiquity?

Jacob Richter · #12 25th October 2008, 06:48

Next up is the section on unemployment ("the industrial reserve army").

Quote:

There is, however, another means which, periodically, is just as powerful. This is the introduction of workingmen from regions that are backward and whose population has slight wants, but whose labor-power has not yet been sapped by the factory system [...] There is a constant stream of emigration from one country of Europe to another, from Europe to America and even from the Orient to western lands. These foreign workers are partly expropriated people, small farmers and producers, whom the capitalist system of production has ruined, driven on the street and deprived not only of a home, but also of a country. Look at these numberless emigrants and ask whether it is Socialism [or capitalism] which robs them of their country.

This "profoundly true and important" paragraph makes me wonder whether I should have quoted this in my commentary on the mobility of labour and the globalization of labour movements (unions).

Quote:

Even in the best times when the market suddenly undergoes a considerable extension and business is brisk, production is not able to furnish work for all the unemployed. During bad times, however, when business is at a standstill, their number reaches enormous proportions. They constitute, with the workers of superfluous small concerns, a great army, “the industrial reserve army,” as Marx called it, an army of labor forces that stands ever ready at the disposal of the capitalist, an army out of which he can draw his reserves whenever the industrial campaign grows hot.

This reminds me of the heated discussion in the Worker Struggles thread on replacement workers:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/laborers-o...657/index.html

Quote:

Excessive work, lack of work, the destruction of the family – these are the gifts that the capitalist system of production brings to the proletariat, and at the same time it forces more and more of the population into proletarian conditions of living.

A succinct remark to conclude one of the key sections in this work, as it relates very much to the current economic crisis

Jacob Richter · #13 24th December 2008, 01:06

Apologies for this last installment of the Chapter 2 commentary, but here goes:

Quote:

There is another and very extensive domain in which the capitalist system of large production tends to turn the population into proletarians – the domain of commerce. The large stores are already bearing heavily upon the smaller ones. The number of small stores does not, for that reason, diminish. On the contrary, it increases. The small store is the last refuge of the bankrupt small producer. Were the small stores actually crowded out, the ground would be wholly taken from under the feet of the small traders; they would then be thrust forthwith below the class of the proletariat – into the slums; they would be turned into beggars, vagabonds and candidates for the penitentiary – a wonderful social reform!

But it is not in the reduction of the number of small stores, it is in the debasement of their character that the influence of large production manifests itself in commerce. The small trader deals in ever worse and cheaper goods; his life becomes more precarious, more proletarian. In the large stores, on the contrary, there is constant increase in the number of employees – genuine proletarians without prospect of ever becoming independent. Child labor, the labor of women, with its accompaniment of prostitution, excessive work, lack of work, starvation wages – all the symptoms of large production – appear also in increasing quantity in the domain of commerce. Steadily the condition of the employees in this department approaches that of the proletarians in the department of production. The only difference perceptible between the two is that the former preserve the appearances of a better living, which require sacrifices unknown to the industrial proletarians.

Here Kautsky brilliantly analyzes the emergence of one segment of clerical workers. Note the words "genuine proletarians" which runs counter to the sectoral-chauvinist notion that only manual workers are "proletarians." All the current talk of outsourcing (re. manufacturing), Wal-Mart, etc. is a mere repeat of what transpired over a century ago!

As for the small store owners, they're merely part of the "tertiary industry" that reduces the role of its "primary" and "secondary" equivalents.

The next and last part before the summary is, to say the least, "gold" in observing the emergence of professional workers - teachers, most professors, nurses, most engineers, most accountants, and any other occupation requiring professional education (usually capped by a proper professional designation):

Quote:

There is still a third category of proletarians that has gone far on the road to its complete development – the educated proletarians. Education has become a special trade under our present system. The measure of knowledge has increased greatly and grows daily. Capitalist society and the capitalist state are increasingly in need of men of knowledge and ability to conduct their business, in order to bring the forces of nature under their power […] Under this system education becomes a merchandise.

A hundred years or so ago this commodity was rare. There were few schools; study was accompanied with considerable expense. So long as small production could support him, the worker stuck to it; only special gifts of nature or favorable circumstances would cause the sons of the workers to dedicate themselves to the arts and sciences. Though there was an increasing demand for teachers, artists and other professional men, the supply was definitely limited.

Since those days the development of higher education has made immense progress. The number of institutions of learning has increased wonderfully, and in a still larger degree, the number of pupils.

[…]

The time is near when the bulk of these proletarians will be distinguished from the others only by their pretensions. Most of them still imagine that they are something better than proletarians. They fancy they belong to the bourgeoisie, just as the lackey identifies himself with the class of his master. They have ceased to be the leaders of the capitalist class and have become rather their defenders. Place-hunting takes more and more of their energies. Their first care is, not the development of their intellect, but the sale of it. The prostitution of their individuality has become their chief means of advancement.

[More comments here: http://www.revleft.com/vb/simplifica...419/index.html ]

Today's "pretensions" come from their "middle-income" status and the ability of a lot of them (if not most) to own homes.

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