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Contents
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The coming of classless society
By Ernest Mandel
1. The socialist goal
Our socialist objective is the replacement of bourgeois society, based
on the struggle of all against all, by a classless community in which
social solidarity replaces the search for individual wealth as the
essential motive for action, and in which the wealth of society assures
the harmonious development of all individuals.
Far from wanting "to make everyone the same", as the ignorant opponents
of socialism pretend, Marxists want to allow the development for the
first time in human history of the whole infinite range of different
possibilities of thought and action present in each individual. But
they understand that social and economic equality, the emancipation of
humanity from the necessity to fight for its daily bread, represents a
precondition for achieving the true realisation of the human
personality in all individuals.
A socialist society therefore requires an economy developed to the
point where production for need supersedes production for profit.
Socialist humanity will no longer produce goods to be exchanged for
money on the market. It will produce use values distributed to all
members of society in order to satisfy their needs.
Such a society will liberate humanity from the chains of the social and
economic division of labour. Marxists reject the thesis according to
which certain people "are born to command" and others "born to obey".
Nobody is by nature marked out to be a miner, a miller or a bus
conductor for the whole of their life. The desire to engage in a
certain number of different activities exists in everybody: you only
have to see what workers do in their leisure time to understand this.
In socialist society the high level of technical and intellectual
skills of every citizen will allow them to set about numerous and
varied tasks during their life, all useful to the community. The choice
of a job will no longer be imposed on people by material forces or
conditions independently of their own wishes. It will depend on their
own needs, their own individual development.
Work will cease to be an imposed burden one tries to avoid, and will
become simply the fulfillment of the personality. Humanity will finally
be free in the real sense of the word. Such a society will try to
eliminate all the sources of conflict between human beings. The immense
resources wasted today in destruction and repression will be turned to
the struggle against disease, to the upbringing of children, to
education and to the arts. Eliminating all the social and economic
antagonisms between people, this society will eliminate all the causes
of war and violent conflict. Only the establishment in the entire world
of a socialist society can guarantee to humanity the universal peace
that is required even for its survival as a species in the epoch of
atomic and thermo-nuclear weapons.
2. The economic and social
conditions for the attainment of this goal
If we do not limit ourselves to dreaming of a radiant future, if we
intend to fight for this future, we must understand that the
construction of a socialist society (which will completely overthrow
the habits and customs established for thousands of years in
class-divided societies) will have to be subordinated to equally
staggering material transformations which must first of all be brought
about.
The achieving of socialism requires above all the suppression of the
private ownership of the means of production. In the epoch of
large-scale industry and modern techniques (which one cannot abandon
without throwing humanity back into generalised poverty), this private
ownership of the means of production inevitably involves the division
of society into a minority of capitalists who exploit and a majority of
wage-earners who are exploited.
The achieving of socialist society demands the suppression of the
wage-earning relationship as such, of the sale of labour power for a
fixed money-wage, which reduces the producer to a powerless cog in
economic life. The remuneration of labour through free access to all
the goods required to satisfy the needs of the producers should be
progressively substituted for the earning of wages. It is only in a
society which assures people such an abundance of goods that a new
social consciousness, a new attitude between people and towards work,
can be born.
Such an abundance of goods is in no way utopian so long as it is
gradually introduced, starting from a progressive rationalisation of
people's needs once they have been emancipated from poverty, from the
constraints of competition, from the race for private enrichment, and
from the advertising manipulations which seek to create a permanent
state of dissatisfaction in individuals. Thus progress in the standard
of living has already created a situation where all but the poorest
people in the imperialist countries can eat all they want of bread,
potatoes, vegetables, some fruits and even dairy products and pork
meat. A similar tendency can be seen with underwear, shoes, basic
furniture, etc — at least in the richest countries. All these products
could be progressively distributed free of charge, without making use
of money and without adding significantly to collective spending. The
same possibility exists for social services such as teaching, health
care, public transport, etc. But the abolition of wage-labour requires
not merely the transformation of the conditions of remuneration and of
distribution of goods. It also means doing away with the hierarchical
structure of the factory and the substitution of a system of producers'
democracy for the sole instructions of the boss (assisted by workshop
managers, foremen, etc.). The aim of socialism is self-government on
all levels of social life, beginning with economic life. It is the
replacement of all institutional hierarchies by elected delegates, of
all permanent functionaries by delegates who take on these
functions in turn. It is in this way that we will be able to establish
the conditions for true equality.
Social wealth which allows the creation of a system of plenty can only
be achieved through a planned economy which avoids any waste such as
the massive non-utilisation of the means of production or unemployment,
as well as their utilisation for ends contrary to humanity's interests.
The emancipation of labour remains dependent on the enormous
development of modern techniques — productive use of atomic
energy (under conditions of maximum security, together with intensive
research for alternative sources of energy); electronic and remote
control mechanisms which allow the complete automation of
production — which liberate humanity more and more from heavy,
degrading, soul-destroying and monotonous tasks. Thus history replies
in advance to the crude old objection to socialism: "Who would do the
dirty jobs in a socialist society?"
The maximum development of production in the most favourable conditions
for humanity will require the maintenance and extension of the
international division of labour (profoundly altered, however, in order
to bring an end to the "advanced"/"dependent" relationship between
countries), the abolition of frontiers, and the planning of the whole
of the world economy. The abolition of frontiers and the real
unification of the human race is, moreover, also a psychological
requirement of socialism, the only means of suppressing economic and
social inequality between nations. The abolition of frontiers in no way
means the suppression of the cultural identity of each nation; on the
contrary, it will permit the assertion of this identity in a more
striking fashion than today, and on its own terms.
The management of factories by the workers, of the economy by a
congress of workers' councils, of all spheres of social life by the
relevant collectivity, also depends upon certain material conditions
for its fulfillment. The radical reduction of the working day —
in fact, the introduction of the half day at work — is absolutely
necessary to give the producers time to manage the factories and the
communities, and to prevent the emergence of a new layer of
professional administrators.
The generalisation of higher education — and a new distribution
of "study time" and "work time" across the whole of men and women's
adult life — is vital for the gradual disappearance of the
separation between manual and intellectual labour. Strict equality of
remuneration, of representation and of opportunities for obtaining new
skills is necessary to ensure that the inequality between the sexes is
not maintained after the disappearance of the inequality between social
classes.
3. The political,
ideological, psychological and cultural conditions for the attainment
of this goal
The material conditions for the arrival of a classless society are
necessary but not sufficient. Socialism and communism will not be the
automatic product of the development of the productive forces, the
disappearance of poverty, and the raising of the level of technical and
intellectual skills of humanity. It will also be necessary to alter the
habits, morals, and ways of thinking which have resulted from thousands
of years of exploitation, oppression and social conditions favouring
the desire for private enrichment.
Above all, it will be necessary to remove all political power from the
dominant classes and to prevent them from getting it back. The general
arming of the workers, replacing the permanent armies, and then the
progressive destruction of all arms, making it impossible for any
partisans of a re-establishment of minority rule to produce these
arms, should allow us to achieve this aim.
The democracy of workers' councils; the exercise of all political power
by these councils; public control of production and the distribution of
wealth; the widest public debate on all matters involving major
political and economic decisions; access for all workers to the means
of information and all organs of public opinion: all this should ensure
once and for all that no return to a regime of oppression and
exploitation is any longer possible.
Then it will be a matter of creating suitable conditions for the
workers to get used to the new security of their existence and stop
measuring their efforts in terms of a specific and expected return.
This psychological revolution can only take place when experience has
taught people that socialist society can guarantee effectively —
and permanently — the satisfaction of all their basic needs,
without having to balance this up against each person's contribution to
the social wealth.
Free food and basic clothing; public services; health care; education;
cultural services — these will allow us to attain this goal after
two or three generations have experienced them. Thenceforth work will
no longer be considered as a means of "earning a living" but will
become a necessary creative activity through which everyone contributes
to the well-being and development of all.
The radical transformation of such structures of oppression as the
patriarchal family, the authoritarian school, and the passive
consumption of ideas and "culture" will go hand in hand with these
social and political transformations.
The dictatorship of the proletariat will suppress no idea and no
scientific, philosophical, religious, literary, cultural or artistic
current. It will not be afraid of ideas, having full confidence in the
superiority of communist ideas. It will not, for all that, be neutral
in the ideological struggle which follows; it will establish all the
conditions suitable for the emancipated proletariat to assimilate the
best products of the old culture and progressively build the elements
of the unified communist culture of future humanity.
The cultural revolution which will set its seal on the construction of
communism will mean above all a revolution in the conditions in which
humanity creates its culture, the transformation of the mass of people
from passive consumers into active cultural producers and creators.
The biggest obstacle which remains to be surmounted in the creation of
a communist world is the enormous gap which separates the per capita
production and standard of living of inhabitants of the advanced
industrial countries from those of the under-developed countries.
Marxism decisively rejects the reactionary utopia of an ascetic
communism of poverty. The flowering of the economic and social life of
the peoples of these regions requires not only the socialist planning
of the world economy but also a radical redistribution of material
resources in favour of these peoples.
Only a transformation of the egotistical, short-sighted and
petty-bourgeois ways of thinking which survive today among important
sections of the working class in the West will enable us to achieve
this goal. Internationalist education will have to go hand in hand with
the adjustment to abundance, which will show that such a redistribution
can take place without leading to a reduction in the living standards
of the Western masses.
4. The stages of the classless society
On the basis of the already rich experience of more than a century of
proletarian revolution — that is, since the Paris Commune —
three stages can be distinguished in the construction of a classless
society:
- The stage of transition
from capitalism to socialism, the stage of the dictatorship of
the proletariat, of the survival of capitalism in important countries,
of the partial survival of commodity production and the money economy,
of the survival of different classes and social layers within the
countries involved in this stage, and therefore of the necessary
survival of the state to defend the interests of the workers against
the partisans of a return to the rule of capital.
- The stage of socialism,
whose construction completes and is characterised by the disappearance
of social classes ("socialism is the classless society", said Lenin),
by the withering away of the commodity and money economy, by the
withering away of the state, by the international triumph of the new
society. However, in the socialist stage the remuneration of everyone
(apart, of course, from the free satisfaction of basic needs) will
continue to be measured in terms of the quantity of labour given to
society.
- The stage of communism,
characterised by the complete application of the principle "from each
according to their ability, to each according to their needs", by the
disappearance of the social division of labour, by the disappearance of
the separation of town and country. Humanity will reorganise itself
into free communes of producer-consumers, capable of administering
themselves without any separate organ for this purpose, at one with a
restored natural habitat and protected from any threat of destruction
of the ecological balance.
However, in a post-capitalist society where the workers and not a
bureaucratic layer hold effective power, there will be no need of
revolutions and similar sudden shifts to move from one stage to the
next. They will result from the progressive evolution of production and
social relations. They will be the expression of the progressive
withering away of commodity categories, of money, of social classes, of
the state, of the social division of labour, and of the thought
processes which resulted from the inequality and social struggles of
the past. The main thing is immediately to begin these processes of
withering away and not to leave them to future generations.
Such is our communist ideal. It constitutes the only solution to the
burning problems with which humanity is confronted. To devote one's
life to its realisation, and therefore to build the Fourth
International, is to live up to the intelligence and generosity of the
best sons and daughters of our species, the most daring thinkers of the
past, the most courageous fighters for the emancipation of labour
— from Spartacus leading the Roman slaves' revolt to those who led the
peasant wars against serfdom, from the heroes of the Paris Commune to
those of the Red Army, from the milicianos who in July 1936 beat the
fascists in Barcelona, Madrid and nearly all the big industrial cities
of Spain to the heroic Vietnamese who in a thirty years' war defeated
Japanese, French and American imperialism.
(Chapter 15 of From Class Society to
Communism, 1977)
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