heiss93
16th December 2009, 01:06
This is the famous in-dept exposition by Cmd Foster about what a Soviet America would look like. Some of the ideas seem to have been derived from Woman and Socialism by August Bebel. A very interesting work.
Also see E.A. Preobrazhensky's A Glance Into the Future of Russia and Europe, http://www.marxists.org/archive/preobrazhensky/1921/fromnep/index.html which is a speculative look-back from the future 1980s to the present 1920s, in a series of "historical" lectures on how Soviet Europe was formed.
THE UNITED STATES OF SOVIET AMERICA
http://www.marxists.org/archive/foster/1932/toward/06.htm
THE MARXIAN principle holds true that the prevailing mode of production and exchange determines the character of the general organization in a given society. Thus the pioneer British capitalist society, based upon the private ownership of industry and the exploitation of the workers, forecast the type which, with only minor variations, came later to be developed by the whole capitalist world. Its parliamentary democracy, rampant patriotism, robot-like education of the masses, reformist trade unionism, etc., fitted naturally into the capitalist scheme of things everywhere.
By the same principle, the Soviet Union now forecasts the general outlines of the new social order that the world is approaching. The Soviet system was not an invention. Its basic institutions arose naturally from the economic and political necessities of workers and peasants freeing themselves from capitalist exploitation. Thus, for the United States as well as other countries, the Soviet Union is a plain indicator of the society that is to be, taking into account minor variations for special conditions in the several lands. It foreshadows the broad lines along which the future Soviet America will develop. Here our task is not to work out all the details of an American Soviet system, as that would exceed the scope of this book, but to trace out, upon the basis of actual experience to date, the general structure and workings of such a regime.
From capitalism to Communism, through the intermediary stage of Socialism; that is the way American society, like society in general, is headed. It represents the main line of march of the human race to the next higher social stage in its historical advance. It is the trend to which all the economic, political and social forces of today are contributing. The American revolution, when the workers have finally seized power, will develop even more swiftly in all its phases than has the Russian revolution. This is because in the United States objective conditions are more ripe for revolution than they were in old Russia. In his work, Imperialism, Lenin states:
“Capitalism, in its imperialist phase, arrives at the threshold of the complete socialization of production. To some extent it causes the capitalists, whether they like it or no, to enter a new social order, which marks the transition from free competition to the socialization of production. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few.”
This means that in such a highly-industrialized country as the United States the industrial base for Socialism is already at hand. The great problem before the workers is to get the political power. The Russian workers, however, not only had to conquer power but also to build a great industrial system. At the Eighth Congress of Soviets, in 1920, Lenin declared that, “Communism is the Soviet power plus the electrification of the country.” In the United States, the problem of the American working class in achieving Socialism may be summed up, as Browder has put it, as the present American industrial technique plus Soviets.
Besides this more favorable industrial base, American workers, once in control, will have other advantages which will greatly speed the tempo of revolutionary development. These are, first, the vast experience accumulated in the Russian revolution, and, second, the practical assistance of the Soviet governments existing at the time of the American revolution. These are enormous advantages. As for the Russian workers, they were pioneers blazing the revolutionary trail. They had to work out for themselves a maze of unique problems and to struggle against a whole hostile capitalist world. The sum of all which is that the period of transition from capitalism to Socialism in the United Soviet States will be much shorter and easier than in the U.S.S.R.
The American Soviet Government
WHEN the American working class actively enters the revolutionary path of abolishing capitalism it will orientate upon the building of Soviets, not upon the adaptation of the existing capitalist government. Capitalist governments have nothing in common with proletarian governments. They are especially constructed throughout to maintain the rulership of the bourgeoisie. In the revolutionary struggle they are smashed and Soviet governments established, built according to the requirements of the toiling masses.
The building of Soviets is begun not after the revolution but before. When the eventual revolutionary crisis becomes acute the workers begin the establishment of Soviets. The Soviets are not only the foundation of the future Workers’ State, but also the main instruments to mobilize the masses for revolutionary struggle. The decisions of the Soviets are enforced by the armed Red Guard of the workers and peasants and by the direct seizure of the industry through factory committees. A revolutionary American working class will follow this general course, which is the way of proletarian revolution.
The American Soviet government will be organized along the broad lines of the Russian Soviets. Local Soviets, the base of the whole Soviet State, will be established in all cities, towns and villages. Local Soviets combine in themselves the legislative, executive and judicial functions. Representation, based on occupation instead of residence and property, comes directly from the shops, mines, farms, schools, workers’ organizations, army, navy, etc. The principle of recall of representatives applies throughout. Citizenship is restricted to those who do useful work, capitalists, landlords, clericals and other non-producers being disfranchised.
The local Soviets will be combined by direct representation into county, state, and national Soviets. The national Soviet government, with its capital in Chicago or some other great industrial center, will consist of a Soviet Congress, made up of local delegates and meeting annually, or as often as need be, to work out the general policies of the government. Between its meetings the government will be carried on by a broad Central Executive Committee, meeting every few months. This C.E.C. will elect a small Presidium and a Council of Commissars, made up of the heads of the various government departments, who will carry on the day-to-day work.
The American Soviet government will join with the other Soviet governments in a world Soviet Union. There will also be, very probably, some form of continental union. The American revolution will doubtless carry with it all those countries of the three Americas that have not previously accomplished the revolution.
The Soviet court system will be simple, speedy and direct. The judges, chosen by the corresponding Soviets, will be responsible to them. The Supreme Court, instead of being dictatorial and virtually legislative, as in the United States, will be purely juridical and entirely under the control of the C.E.C. The civil and criminal codes will be simplified, the aim being to proceed directly and quickly to a correct decision. In the acute stages of the revolutionary struggle special courts to fight the counter-revolution will probably be necessary. The pest of lawyers will be abolished. The courts will be class-courts, definitely warring against the class enemies of the toilers. They will make no hypocrisy like capitalist courts, which, while pretending to deal out equal justice to all classes, in reality are instruments of the capitalist State for the repression and exploitation of the toiling masses.
The American Soviet government will be the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Chapter II we explained this dictatorship as the revolutionary government of the workers and toiling farmers. In the proletarian dictatorship the working class is the leader by virtue of its revolutionary program, superior organization and greater numbers. Towards the farmers, the attitude of the government will vary from an open alliance with the poor farmers and cooperation with the middle farmers, to open hostility against the big, exploiting landowners. Towards the city intelligentsia and petty bourgeoisie generally, its attitude will be one of friendliness and cooperation, insofar as these elements break with the old order and support the new. The new Workers’ government, as part of its task of building Socialism, necessarily will have to hold firmly in check the counter-revolutionary elements who seek to overthrow or sabotage the new regime. To suppose that the powerful American capitalist class and its vast numbers of hangers-on will tamely submit to the loss of their power to the workers would be to ignore the whole history of that class. The mildness or severity of the repressive measures used by the workers to liquidate this class politically will depend directly upon the character of the latter’s resistance. While the whole trend of the revolutionary workers is against violence, they always have an iron fist for counter-revolution.
In order to defeat the class enemies of the revolution, the counter-revolutionary intrigues within the United States and the attacks of foreign capitalist countries from without, the proletarian dictatorship must be supported by the organized armed might of the workers, soldiers, local militia, etc. In the early stages of the revolution, even before the seizure of power, the workers will organize the Red Guard. Later on this loosely constructed body becomes developed into a firmly-knit, well-disciplined Red Army.
The leader of the revolution in all its stages is the Communist party. With its main base among the industrial workers, the Party makes a bloc with the revolutionary farmers and impoverished city petty bourgeoisie, drawing under its general leadership such revolutionary groups and organizations as these classes may have. Under the dictatorship all the capitalist parties—Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Socialist, etc.—will be liquidated, the Communist party functioning alone as the Party of the toiling masses. Likewise, will be dissolved all other organizations that are political props of the bourgeois rule, including chambers of commerce, employers’ associations, rotary clubs, American Legion, Y.M.C.A., and such fraternal orders as the Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, Knights of Columbus, etc.
A Soviet government will provide the workers and poor farmers with the political instrument necessary to defend their interests. The whole purpose of such a government will be to advance the welfare of those who do useful work. This is not the case with the present government of the United States. It is dominated by the Morgans, Mellons and other big bankers and industrialists. Its function is to protect the interests of the capitalist class—in first line finance capital—at the expense of the working masses. Every piece of legislation, every strike, every demonstration of the unemployed illustrates this afresh. In no matter what field, wherever the interests of the workers are involved, they find the powers of the government arrayed against them. The American government is as much the property of the capitalists as their mills, mines, factories and land. Only a Soviet government can and will represent the will of the workers.
The establishment of an American Soviet government will mark the birth of real democracy in the United States. For the first time the toilers will be free, with industry and the government in their own hands. Now they are enslaved: the industries and the government are the property of the ruling class. The right to vote and all the current talk about democracy are only so many screens to hide the capitalist autocracy and to make it more palatable to the masses. Consider the economic and political gulf between the Southern textile workers slaving for $5 a week and the rich Southern capitalists; between the hungry unemployed workers in the Northern cities and the fat capitalist parasite masters lolling the Winters through at Palm Beach; between the semi-slave Negroes in the South and their exploiters; between the outrageous treatment visited upon Mooney and Billings, Sacco and Vanzetti and many other class war prisoners and the protection given to the Falls, Daughertys and the whole clique of capitalist robbers of the poor—then one gets the true measure of the American capitalist “democracy” and “freedom.” Ambassador Gerard blurted out the truth that the American government is a capitalist dictatorship when he declared that 59 bankers and captains of industry are the real rulers of the United States.
The Liberation of the Negro
THE CAPITALIST class not only robs the workers as a whole, but it visits special exploitation upon those sections of the working class—Negroes, foreign-born, women, youth, the aged, etc.—who, for one reason or another, are the least able to defend themselves in the class struggle. The American Soviet government will drastically eliminate such special discrimination, along with capitalist exploitation generally.
Above all, as we have remarked, it is the Negro who is singled out for the bitterest exploitation and persecution by the capitalists. His condition is comparable only to that of the “untouchables” of India and is the most crying outrage of American capitalism. He is set apart as a pariah, an object of contempt and scorn, a victim of the most systematic suppression and enslavement to be found anywhere in the modern industrial world.
The purpose of all this tyranny and repression is, of course, the most intense robbery of the Negro toilers; for the vast majority of Negroes are either poor farmers or workers. The Jim-Crow system, with all its cultivated snobbery of race, is a device of the ruling classes to whip extra profits out of the hides of the oppressed Negroes by splitting them off from the rest of the toilers.
The Republican party, boasted friend of the Negro, is equally responsible with the Democratic party for the maintenance of this criminal outrage. Such Negro organizations as the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, dominated by the white and Negro capitalists and petty bourgeoisie, also have this responsibility; they live by cultivating segregationalism; they sabotage every real fight for the liberation of the Negro. In the case of the framedup nine Scottsboro Negro boys, the attorney of the N.A.A.C.P. made a purely formal defense, practically coinciding with the prosecution.
As for the American Federation of Labor, its record on the Negro question is one of shame and treachery; it falls into step with the whole capitalist policy by barring Negroes from its unions, by blocking their entry into the better-paid jobs, by refusing to fight for their burning demands, by cultivating the insidious white chauvinism. The measure of the policy of the A.F. of L. on the Negro question is to be seen, for example, in Atlanta, where Negroes are not even allowed to enter the local labor temple.
The Socialist party, despite all its parade of radicalism and alleged friendship of the Negro, follows the same basic Jim-Crow line as the A.F. of L. This was clearly shown by Heywood Broun, Socialist leader, when he said:
“If I were a candidate for high executive office, or judiciary office, I would say, even without being cornered, that I would not now sanction the efforts to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.”5
The Communist party, alone of all the political parties, fights for the liberation of the Negro, both in the present-day struggle and as an ultimate goal. The American Soviet government, immediately it takes power, will deal a shattering blow to the whole monstrous Jim-Crowism. To destroy it ruthlessly will be one of the real joys of the victorious proletarian revolution. Every remnant of slavery will be abolished. In a Soviet system, the Negro will have the most complete equality—economically, politically, socially. The doors to every occupation, to every social activity, will be wide open for him. He will have ample land, confiscated from the great white landlords. He will be free to do and go as any other citizen, without let or hindrance. Attempts to maintain the capitalist white chauvinism and ostracism of the Negroes will be punished as a serious crime against society. Socialism will mean the first real freedom for the Negro. He is beginning to realize this, hence his mass turning to the Communist party for leadership, and the consequent deep alarm of the capitalists and big landowners at this growing unity of white and black toilers.
The status of the American Negro is that of an oppressed national minority, and only a Soviet system can solve the question of such minorities. This it does, in addition to setting up real equality in the general political and social life, by establishing the right of self-determination for national minorities in those parts of the country where they constitute the bulk of the population. The constitution of the Soviet Union provides that, “Each united republic retains the right of free withdrawal from the Union.” The Program of the Communist International declares for:
“The recognition of the right of all nations, irrespective of race, to complete self-determination, that is, self-determination inclusive of the right to State separation.”
Accordingly, the right of self-determination will apply to Negroes in the American Soviet system. In the so-called Black Belt of the South, where the Negroes are in the majority, they will have the fullest right to govern themselves and also such white minorities as may live in this section. The same principle will apply to all the colonial and semi-colonial peoples now dominated by American imperialism in Cuba, the Philippines, Central and South America, etc.
And logically, foreign-born workers, now denied the right to vote and ruthlessly deported, will enjoy the fullest rights of citizenship. One of the most monstrous features of the present attack upon the working class is the deportation of tens of thousands of foreign-born workers by Doak’s Department of Labor. These masses of workers, torn away from home and families, are sent back to countries with which they have lost all touch. Doak’s deportation campaign, part of the capitalist offensive, is an attempt to terrorize the foreign-born workers, to crush every semblance of resistance among them, to split them off from the American-born workers. The wholesale deportation of radical workers and leaders is an attempt to illegalize the Communist party and the TUUL.
The experience with self-determination of national minorities in the Soviet Union shows that the Russians have solved this problem with the revolution. The many national minorities have the right of self-determination; they have their own languages, their own culture. Yet they all live together in the strongest unity under the general constitution of the U.S.S.R. Where there is no capitalist or feudal exploitation there can be no suppression of weaker nationalities. The radical liquidation of the “insoluble” Jewish problem in the U.S.S.R. testifies to the completeness of the Bolshevik cure. Murderous pogroms, a curse of old Russia, are now totally eradicated. The Jews enjoy absolute equality with all other nationalities. The solution of the question of suppressed nationalities, a question which causes untold misery in the capitalist world, is one of the greatest achievements of the Russian revolution.
The American Soviet will, of course, abolish all restrictions upon racial intermarriage. The arguments of Ku Klux Klanners and the like that Negroes are an inferior race and that “mongrel” peoples are less capable, have no justification in science and social experience. Those “scientists” who endorse such “white supremacy” theories are only so many bought-and-paid-for upholders of the prevailing mode of exploitation. The facts are that all the big peoples of today are already hopelessly “mongrel” and that wherever Negroes have half a chance they demonstrate their intellectual equality with the whites. Geographic isolation of the early human stock into widely separated groups brought about its differentiation into individual races; contact between these various races, bred of modern industrialization, is just as irresistibly breaking down these racial differences and bringing about racial amalgamation. The revolution will only hasten this process of integration, already proceeding throughout the world with increasing tempo.
The Emancipation of Woman
WHEN woman emerged historically from feudalism she was burdened with a whole series of customs, prejudices and restrictions enslaving her in her work, her personal life and her political status. Characteristically capitalism, which respects nothing in its greed for profits, quickly seized upon all these handicaps of woman and used them to doubly exploit her. This is true of the United States as well as other capitalist countries. The so-called freedom of the American woman is a myth. Either she is a gilded butterfly bourgeois parasite or she is an oppressed slave.
The life of the working class woman and poor farmer’s wife is one of drudgery and exploitation. Capitalism sees in her mainly a breeder of wage slaves and soldiers. The boasted American home, enslaving the woman through her economic inferiority and her children, makes her dependent upon her husband. On all sides she confronts medieval sex taboos, assiduously cultivated by the church, State and bourgeois moralists. When she goes into industry she has to toil for from a third to a half less than the male worker; she works at a killing pace under unhealthful conditions and she is barred from many occupations under the hypocritical and reactionary slogan, “The woman’s place is in the home”; the A.F. of L. betrays her every attempt to organize and to defend her interests. Politically, she is practically a zero, having little or no opportunity to educate herself or to function in an organized manner. Finally, to cap the climax of woman’s enslavement, capitalism maintains in full blast the “oldest profession,” prostitution.
The proletarian revolution will profoundly change all this. The American Soviet government will immediately set about liquidating the elaborate network of slavery in which woman is enmeshed. She will be freed economically, politically and socially. The U.S.S.R. shows the general lines along which the emancipation of woman will also proceed in a Soviet America.
The Russian woman is free economically, and this is the foundation of all her freedom. Every field of activity is open to her. She is to be found even in such occupations as locomotive engineer, electrical crane operator, machinist, factory director, etc. There are women generals in the Red Army, women ambassadors, etc. Two-thirds of the medical students are women. In industry the women are thoroughly organized in the trade unions. They get the same pay as men, and are protected by an elaborate system of maternity and other social insurance. In politics the women of the Soviet Union are a major and militant factor.
The Russian woman is also free in her sex life. When married life becomes unwelcome for a couple they are not barbarously compelled to live together. Divorce is to be had for the asking by one or both parties. The woman’s children are recognized as legitimate by the State and society, whether born in official wedlock or not. The free American woman, like her Russian sister, will eventually scorn the whole fabric of bourgeois sex hypocrisy and prudery.
In freeing the woman, Socialism liquidates the drudgery of housework. So important do Communists consider this question that the Communist International deals with it in its world program. In the Soviet Union the attack upon housework slavery is delivered from every possible angle. Great factory kitchens are being set up to prepare hot, well-balanced meals for home consumption by the millions; communal kitchens in apartment houses are organized widespread. Every device to simplify and reduce housework is spread among the masses with all possible dispatch.
To free the woman from the enslavement of the perpetual care of her children is also a major object of Socialism. To this end in the Soviet Union there is being developed the most elaborate system of kindergartens and playgrounds in the world—in the cities and villages, in the neighborhoods and around the factories. Of this development, Anna Razamova says:
“All these institutions for child welfare mean a great deal in the life of the working woman. They free her from the necessity of spending all her time at home, cleaning, cooking and mending. While she is at work she can be sure that her child is being well taken care of, and that it is supervized by trained nurses and teachers, and gets wholesome food at regular hours.”6
The free Russian woman is the trail blazer for the toiling women of the world. She is beating out a path which, ere long, her American sister will begin to follow.
Unshackling the Youth
A RULING class which did not hesitate to send more than twelve million young men to their death in the World War to further its greed for wealth and power, naturally does not stick at the most ruthless exploitation of the youth at all other times. Capitalism, whose great god is profit, poisons society at its source; it destroys the seed corn of the human race, the young.
The condition of the children of the American working class is a damning indictment of capitalism. Recently even President Hoover admitted that in the United States, the richest country in the world, 6,000,000 children are chronically undernourished. The starved masses of workers, harassed by low wages and unemployment, are unable to feed their children properly, and the State callously shrugs its shoulders at the problem. Great masses of them slave in the industries, while their parents go around jobless. The position of the workers’ children has naturally grown immeasurably worse during the present industrial crisis. The Nation, (Mar. 23, 1932), exposes a typical condition when it declares: “5,000 to 10,000 children in Detroit are daily in child bread lines.” Regarding a recent investigation of conditions among continuation school boys in New York, Grace Hutchens states:
“Of 2,700 working boys, less than one in seven was found free from physical defects. One-fifth of them were under-weight from under-nourishment. Three-fifths needed dental care. Defective eyesight, adenoids, undeveloped chest, poor muscle tone, diseased tonsils, anemia, heart conditions, and tuberculosis scars were common. Most of these difficulties could have been prevented.”7
The Labour Research Association says in its Bulletin of Nov. 9, 1931:
“In Detroit, in a single school in the working class district, 500 children refused to report for classes. Investigation showed that more than half of them lacked even clothes and shoes. In Chicago, children are fainting from lack of food and 15,000 are starving. In Cleveland, the number of under-nourished children in the elementary schools will reach 15,000 before the end of the present term. A recent study of 290 typical children in West Virginia coal towns by Dr. Ruth Fox of the Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City, showed that in Ward, W. Va., their average weight was 12% below the standard.”
The generally disastrous effects of such conditions may be better imagined than described. Capitalism, besides thus feeding, vampire-like upon children, no less ruthlessly exploits the youth, who are becoming an ever-greater factor in industry. It drives their immature bodies at a pace in production which even adult workers cannot endure; it forces them to work at lower wages than grownups; child labor laws are “more honored in the breach than in the observance.” Special victims in this raw exploitation are the Negro youth.
Such barbarous conditions for the youth are, of course, utterly alien to Socialism. Just as inevitably as a profit-seeking, anarchic, socially-irresponsible capitalism ruins the young of the people, so inevitably, does an ordered and responsible Socialism take the greatest care of its youth. In the very center of the whole Communist program stands the systematic protection and development of the children and young workers. Even the sharpest enemies of the Soviet Union have to admit the truth of this. Not even in the darkest days of the civil war, when hunger and pestilence were rampant, was the welfare of the youth ever lost sight of in the U.S.S.R. They always had plenty, although often their parents were semi-starved. A bourgeois correspondent, Julia Blanshard, says:
“Youth is one of the first concerns of Soviet Russia. You, as an elder, might live on cabbage soup, but your children would have meat stews and even sweets. Russia looks to the future, not the past. . . The children look clean, well-nourished, neatly dressed and alert.”8
Under Socialism the care of the children rests directly with the parents—stories of the nationalization of children in the Soviet Union are ridiculous. But the State does not let matters rest entirely with the parents. It throws such additional safeguards around the children in the schools, kindergartens, etc., of city and village that none can possibly go hungry, be denied medical care or lack education.
The Soviet government, the trade unions and the Communist Youth League, as well as the Party and other organizations, vigilantly protect the youth employed in Russian industry. The general conditions they have set up indicate the lines of development in the United States. There is no industrial child labor. And such driving as exists among the millions of young workers in American industries is unheard of. The Russian young workers work only six hours daily; they are shielded from night work and especially dangerous or heavy toil. The Soviet Union is the only country in the world where the youth are paid equal wage rates with adults for similar work. The health and education of the young workers is promoted by vast sport and cultural organizations. In politics the youth are a real factor, the franchise being based upon the principle, “Old enough to work, old enough to vote.” In every walk in life the antiquated prejudices that the “elders” alone must lead have been broken down and the path is clear for the development of full leadership on the basis of ability and regardless of age. In the United States, as in the U.S.S.R., the Soviet system will open up a new world for the youth.
The Cultural Revolution in the United States
PRESENT-DAY culture in this country is an instrument by which the capitalist class consolidates its dominant position. The prevailing systems of education, morality, ethics, science, art, patriotism, religion, etc., are as definitely parts of capitalist exploitation as the stock exchange. The schools, churches, newspapers, motion pictures, radio, theatres and various other avenues of publicity and mass instruction are the organized propaganda machinery of the ruling class.
The chief aims of bourgeois culture, so far as it is directed towards the working class, are to develop the workers into, (1) slave-like robots who will accept uncomplainingly whatever standards of life and work the owners of industry see fit to grant them; (2) unthinking soldiers who will enthusiastically get themselves killed off in defense of their masters’ rulership; (3) superstitious dolts who will satisfy themselves with a promise of paradise after death as a substitute for a decent life here on earth. To these ends the workers are regimented in the schools, poisoned by the militaristic Boy Scouts and C.M.T.C., enmeshed in fascist-like sport organizations, herded into the strike-breaking Y.M.C.A., stuffed with endless rot in the newspapers and movies, jammed into religious training before they are able to think for themselves, etc. As for real education, about all the workers get of it in school is the minimum of the three R’s required to enable them to perform the tasks allotted them in industry.
So far as this culture is directed to the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, it results in a mass production of capitalist intellectual robots. The schools and colleges, firmly in the grip of finance capital, as Upton Sinclair so completely showed in his book, The Goose Step, are great manufactories of Babbitts. In no country is culture so debased by capitalism as in the United States. Essentially a gigantic effort to perpetuate the robbery of the workers, it is sterile, hypocritical, colorless, lifeless. America’s capitalistic writers are engaged in trying to convince the working class what a glorious thing it is to be a wage slave; her artists and poets are busy glorifying Heinz’s pickles and the advertising pages of The Saturday Evening Post; her dramatists and musicians are cooking up patriotic slush and idiotic sex stories to divert the masses from their troubles and the hopeless boredom of capitalist life; her scientists are trying to prove the unity of science and religion, etc., etc.
The proletarian revolution in the United States will at once make a devastating slash into this maze of hypocrisy and intellectual rubbish. Not less than in the Soviet Union, it will usher in a profound cultural revolution. For the first time in history the toiling masses will have the opportunity to know and enjoy the good things of life. With prosperity assured for all, with no slave class to stultify intellectually and with no system of exploitation to defend, Communist culture will have a mass base and will flourish luxuriantly and free. It will call forth the artistic and intellectual powers of the masses, always hitherto repressed by chattel slavery, feudalism and capitalism. Superstition, and ignorance will vanish in a realm of science; “Culture will become the acquirement of all and the class ideologies of the past will give place to scientific materialist philosophy.”9
Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following; the schools, colleges and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and the general ethics of the new Socialist society. Present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy.
The churches will remain free to continue their services, but their special tax and other privileges will be liquidated. Their buildings will revert to the State. Religious schools will be abolished and organized religious training for minors prohibited. Freedom will be established for anti-religious propaganda.
The whole basis and organization of capitalist science will be revolutionized. Science will become materialistic, hence truly scientific; God will be banished from the laboratories as well as from the schools. Science will be thoroughly organized and will work according to plan; instead of the present individualistic hit-or-miss scientific dabbling, there will be a great organization of science, backed by the full power of the government. This organization will make concerted attacks upon the central problems, concrete and abstract, that confront science.
The press, the motion picture, the radio, the theatre, will be taken over by the government. They will be cleansed of their present trash of sex, crime, sensationalism and general babbitry, and developed into institutions of real education and art; into purveyors of the interesting, dramatic, and amusing in life. The press will, through workers’ correspondents on the Russian lines, become the actual voice of the people, not simply the forum of professional writers.
The American Soviet government will, of course, give the greatest possible stimulus to art in every form, seeking to cultivate the latent powers of the masses. Painting, sculpture, literature, music—every form of artistic expression—will flourish as never before. The great art treasures of the rich will be confiscated and assembled in museums for the enjoyment and instruction of the toiling masses. Cultural societies of all kinds will be developed energetically.
One of the basic concerns of the workers’ government will be, naturally, the conservation of the health of the masses. To this end a national Department of Health will be set up, with the necessary local and State sub-divisions. A free medical service, based upon the most scientific principles, will be established. The people will be taught how to live correctly. They will be given mass instruction in diet, physical culture, etc. A last end will be put to capitalist medical quackery and the adulteration of food.
A main task of the American Soviet government will be to make the cities liveable. This will involve not only the wholesale destruction of the shacks that millions of workers now call homes, but the building over of the congested capitalist cities into roomy Socialist towns. These will develop towards the decentralization of industry and population, the breaking down of the differences between city and country. There will be no great landed, financial, and transportation interests to maintain the monstrous congestion typical of capitalist cities. The present “city beautiful” plans of capitalism will seem puny and trivial to the future city builders of Socialism.
Only a few years ago many of the foregoing proposals would have seemed fantastic, merely Utopian dreams. But now we can see them growing into actuality in the Soviet Union. In making the cultural revolution in the United States, the workers and farmers, facing the same general problems as the Russians, will solve them along similar lines.
Curing Crime and Criminals
CAPITALISM, by its very nature, is a prolific breeder of crime. It is a system of legalized robbery of the working class. The whole process of capitalist business is a swindle and an armed hold-up. In capitalist society what constitutes crime and what does not is a purely arbitrary distinction. The capitalists do not recognize any line of demarcation for themselves. They do whatever they can “get away with.” The record of every large fortune and big corporation in this country is smeared not only with brutal robbery of the workers but also statutory crime of every description, from the bribery of legislatures to plain murder. Wall Street is full of uncaught Kreugers.
In a society where each grabs what he can at the expense of the rest, naturally the government offers a wide field of corruption. It is a well-known fact, emphasized afresh by the Seabury investigation in New York, that every city and State in this country is controlled by grafting politicians, allied with the criminal underworld. The Teapot Dome scandal, not to mention numerous others, shows that the national government is also permeated with this gross corruption. Such corruption is not a special condition, but of the very tissue of capitalism.
It is not surprising that in a system of society where the aim is to get rich by any means, crime of every kind should flourish. Faced by low wages and other impossible economic conditions on the one hand and by the corrupt example of capitalism generally on the other, many naturally take to lives of open crime and try to seize at the point of a gun what the capitalist “big shots” steal through exploiting the workers, by a corner on the stock exchange, or by corrupting the government. The main difference between their operations is primarily one of dimension. Al Capone is an altogether legitimate child of American capitalism, and it is no accident that he is an object of such widespread admiration.
The American Soviet government will liquidate the mounting crime wave which, according to the Wickersham committee, costs the government a billion dollars yearly. Socialism, by putting an end to capitalist exploitation, deals a mortal blow at crime of every description. The economic base of crime is destroyed. The worker is enabled to live and work under the best possible conditions. There is no place for human sharks to prey upon their fellow men. Not only does the abolition of capitalism destroy the basis of the so-called crimes against property, but the revolutionized economic and social conditions, involving an intelligent moral code and effective educational system, also greatly diminish the “crimes of passion.”
These facts are already demonstrated in the Soviet Union, which is fast becoming a crimeless country. While the exigencies of the revolutionary struggle against the counter-revolution made it necessary, from time to time, to confine a considerable number of political prisoners, this need is now fast passing with the consolidation of the Socialist regime and the liquidation of the last remnants of the exploiting classes in the Soviet Union. Life and property are safer now in the U.S.S.R. than in any other country in the world. Crime is rapidly sinking into abeyance and this will be more and more the case as the new society becomes strengthened.
Capitalism blames crime upon the individual, instead of upon the bad social conditions which produce it. Hence its treatment of crime is essentially one of punishment. But the failure of its prisons, with their terrible sex-starvation, graft, over-crowding, idleness, stupid discipline, ferociously long sentences and general brutality, is overwhelmingly demonstrated by the rapidly mounting numbers of prisoners and the long list of terrible prison riots. Capitalist prisons are actually schools of crime. Even the standpat Wickersham committee had to condemn the atrocious American prison system as brutal, medieval and fruitless.
Socialist criminology, on the other hand, attacks the bad social conditions. While the American Soviet government will ruthlessly break up the underworld gangs that brazenly infest all American cities and will also give short shrift to grafting politicians, its prison system will be essentially educational in character. In the new Russian prisons, for example, the prisoners have the right to marry and to live with their families; they are taught useful trades and are paid full union wages for their work; there are no guards or walls or bars; the discipline is organized entirely by the prisoners themselves. The prisoners are also allowed freely to visit their friends in other towns. The lengths of the terms to be served are determined by the prisoners’ committees, on the basis of the fitness of the given prisoners to resume their places in society. The whole terminology of crime, criminal, prison, etc., has been abandoned in such institutions. Upon release, a prisoner is not only able to make his way in society but is welcomed. He is eligible to belong to the Communist party. It requires very little imagination to see the great advantages of this Socialist system over the barbarous prisons of capitalist countries. Congressman W. I. Sirovich, (Dem., N. Y.), said, after a recent visit to the Soviet Union, “The Russian prison system sets an example that is worthy of emulation by any nation in the world.”10
Prohibition, based upon a criminal alliance between capitalists, crooked politicians and gangsters, has bred a growth of criminals such as the world has never seen before. And the “best minds” of the country stand powerless before the problem. The American Soviet government will deal with this question by eliminating prohibition, by establishing government control of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquors; these measures to be supported by an energetic campaign among the masses against excessive drinking.
This way of handling the prohibition question is working successfully in the Soviet Union. Shortly after the October revolution the Soviet government prohibited the sale or manufacture of alcoholic drinks. But soon bootlegging began, with familiar demoralizing consequences: poisonous liquor was made, much badly-needed grain was wasted, open violation of the law existed on all sides. Then, with characteristic vigor and clarity of purpose, the government legalized the making and selling of intoxicating beverages. At the same time, a big campaign was initiated by the government, the Party, the trade unions, etc., to educate the workers against alcoholism. This program is succeeding; the evils of alcoholism are definitely on the decline. Doubtless, the Russians have found the real solution of the liquor question. Just as Socialism is abolishing so many other evils, it is also rapidly wiping out alcoholism and the mass of misery and degradation that accompanies it.
The Abolition of War
ONE OF the revolutionary achievements of victorious world Communism will be the ending of war. In Chapter I we have seen the great and growing danger of a new world war and also the utter futility of all the capitalist peace pacts and disarmament schemes as war preventives. We have also seen the economic forces of imperialism behind the war danger. So long as capitalism lasts war must continue to curse the human race. It is the historical task of the proletariat to put an end to this hoary monster. This it will do by destroying the capitalist system and with it the economic causes that bring about war.
It is characteristic of capitalism to justify all the robbery and misery and terrors of its system by seeking to create the impression that they are caused by basic traits in human nature, or even by “acts of god.” Thus we find current many metaphysical and mysterious explanations of the present crisis and unemployment. These preventable disasters are made to appear almost as natural phenomena over which mankind has no control, like tornadoes and earthquakes. The same general attitude is taken with regard to war. War is put forth as arising out of the very nature of humanity. Man is pictured as a war-like animal, and therefore capitalism escapes responsibility. War becomes more or less inevitable.
This is all nonsense, of course. Man is by nature a gregarious and friendly animal. He does not make war because he dislikes others of his own species, differing from him in language, religion, geographical location, etc. His wars have always arisen out of struggles over the very material things of wealth and power. This is true, whether he has been living in a tribal, slave, feudal or capitalist economy, and whether he has obscured the true cause of his wars with an intense religious garb or with slogans about making the world safe for democracy. The cause of modern war is, as we have already seen, the imperialistic policies of the capitalist nations to rob the colonial peoples, to smash back the growing revolutionary movement, to crush each other in the world struggle for markets, raw materials and territory. In a society in which there is no private property in industry and land, in which no exploitation of the workers takes place and where plenty is produced for all, there can be no grounds for war. The interests of a Socialist society are fundamentally opposed to the murderous and unnatural struggle of international war.
Under capitalism the workers, by militant and well-organized struggle, can check the development of war. By the threat of revolution they can, for a time, force the capitalists to hold in leash their dogs of war. This fear has contributed basically to holding the capitalist governments so long from making another open armed attack upon the Soviet Union. But pressure from the workers can only delay the war, not stop it permanently. The irresistible and incurable antagonisms of the capitalist countries inevitably force them into war, revolution or no revolution. Only the proletarian revolution itself can solve these war-breeding contradictions and put a final end to war. Not Christianity but Communism will bring peace on earth.
A Communist world will be a unified, organized world. The economic system will be one great organization, based upon the principle of planning now dawning in the U.S.S.R. The American Soviet government will be an important section in this world organization. In such a society there will be no tariffs or the many other barriers erected by capitalism against a free world interchange of goods. The raw material supplies of the world will be at the disposition of the peoples of the world.
Politically, the world will be organized. There will be no colonies, no “spheres of influence,” no hypocritical “open doors.” The toilers will then have fully realized Marx’s famous slogan, “Workingmen of the World, Unite!” The interests of the toiling masses in the various countries will not be in conflict, but in harmony with each other. Those who speak of “red imperialism” repeat the calumnies of capitalism. Once the power of the bourgeoisie is broken internationally and its States destroyed, the world Soviet Union will develop towards a scientific administration of things, as Engels describes. There will be no place for the present narrow patriotism, the bigoted nationalist chauvinism that serves so well the capitalist warmakers. Armies and navies, rendered obsolete, will be disbanded. Grim war will meet its Waterloo.
At the meeting of the League of Nations’ Preparatory Commission for Disarmament at Geneva in November, 1927, the representatives of the Soviet Union presented a proposal for complete world disarmament. It was later re-enforced by the Soviet Union’s proposal for a general economic non-aggression pact, by its non-aggression treaties with individual governments, and by its generally firm peace policy in the face of imperialist provocation.
But, of course, the imperialist capitalist nations did not accept the Soviet Union’s plan for doing away with war. The U.S.S.R. is the only country that genuinely struggles for peace; the capitalist powers need war in their business. War is not to be ended in capitalist peace conferences, but by revolutionary struggle of the toiling masses against capitalism itself. Hence, inevitably, the capitaists at Geneva ridiculed the Soviet 1927 proposals and shortly afterwards adopted as a substitute the supremely hypocritical Kellogg Peace Pact, meanwhile intensifying their own war preparations. They have again rejected the Soviet Union’s disarmament proposal at the present Geneva conference. Thereby they expose afresh to the workers of the world the fact that they do not want peace, but war. It will be only when the workers and peasants have finally defeated international capitalism and are assembled to re-organize the world on a Socialist basis that a proposal for general disarmament will be adopted and carried into effect. This event, being irresistibly prepared by the deepening capitalist crisis and the growing mobilization of the world’s toilers under the leadership of the Communist International, will take place sooner than the world bourgeoisie dare think and it will be one of the very greatest steps forward ever taken by the human race.
Socialist Incentive
ONE OF the classical capitalist arguments against Socialism is that it would destroy incentive; that is, if private property in industry and the right to exploit the workers were abolished the urge for social progress, and even for day-to-day production, would be killed.
But the Russian revolution has shattered this contention irreparably. The Russian workers and peasants are building Socialism with a mass energy and enthusiasm quite unparalleled in history. Manifestly, they are propelled by a great incentive. This is a marvel to the bourgeois newspaper correspondents. But it is just as Marx, three gen erations ago, said it would be under Socialism.
The incentive of the Russian toilers is easily explained. They own the country and everything in it. There is no exploiting class to rob them of the fruits of their toil. They welcome better production methods because they get the full benefit of them. They have broken the chain of capitalist slavery and are building a new world of liberty, prosperity and happiness for themselves and families. It is equally understandable why the producing masses in capitalist countries betray no such enthusiasm in their work. The latter are robbed of what they produce; for them improvements in production mean wage-cuts and unemployment. Incentive under capitalism is confined practically to the exploiting classes and their hangers-on. It is only with the advent of Socialism that the great masses develop real incentive.
Socialist incentive in the Soviet Union explains why the workers so militantly defended the revolution against the many capitalist armies in 1918-20, and why they have endured famine and pestilence for the revolution. In the industries it is an intelligent mass incentive that provides the basis for the keen Socialist competition, for shock-brigades to speed production, for the self-imposed labor discipline, for the heroic present-day selfdenial in putting the Five-Year Plan into effect so that a solid base of heavy industry may be quickly laid for the Socialist prosperity.
In view of all this mass interest and initiative of the workers in Soviet industry current capitalist charges about “forced labor” in the U.S.S.R. stand exposed as ridiculous. Forced labor is native to capitalism, not Socialism. The whole Socialist system is utterly antagonistic to any enslavement of the workers. Even bourgeois writers and politicians are beginning to admit this. H. R. Mussey says: “If anybody wants a bargain in forced labor, or any other kind of labor, I should advise him not to look for it in Russia just now, as far as I have seen it; for it is a seller’s market in labor if ever there was one.”11 Rep. H. T. Rainey, Democratic House leader, declares: “Labor is freer in Russia than in any other country in the world.”12
The differentiated wage scales, including piecework, in the Soviet Union constitute no contradiction to the prevalent strong mass incentive. Temporarily, they must serve to stimulate the less conscious elements to acquire skill and to produce. The wage system as a whole is a hang-over from capitalism, part of the baggage that has to be discarded during the transition from capitalism to Communism. Improved production methods and general education will solve that problem. Recently Stalin said, in polemizing against tendencies to at once equalize wages:
“Marx and Lenin said that the differences between skilled and unskilled work would continue to exist even under Socialism and even after the classes had been annihilated, that only under Communism would this difference disappear, that therefore, even under Socialism Vages* must be paid according to the labor performed and not according to need.”13
Besides the revolutionary enthusiasm and initiative of the masses and many other indications already present of the eventual wageless system there is the “Party maximum.” That is, the members of the Communist party have a set wage limit above which they cannot go. Thus Stalin gets the same wages, as many hundreds of thousands of other workers and much less than large numbers of non- Party mechanics and engineers. “Russia,” says Stuart Chase, “has achieved more progress and developed more initiative on $150 a month, the official Party salary, than any other nation has ever dreamed of in an equal period.”14
Also see E.A. Preobrazhensky's A Glance Into the Future of Russia and Europe, http://www.marxists.org/archive/preobrazhensky/1921/fromnep/index.html which is a speculative look-back from the future 1980s to the present 1920s, in a series of "historical" lectures on how Soviet Europe was formed.
THE UNITED STATES OF SOVIET AMERICA
http://www.marxists.org/archive/foster/1932/toward/06.htm
THE MARXIAN principle holds true that the prevailing mode of production and exchange determines the character of the general organization in a given society. Thus the pioneer British capitalist society, based upon the private ownership of industry and the exploitation of the workers, forecast the type which, with only minor variations, came later to be developed by the whole capitalist world. Its parliamentary democracy, rampant patriotism, robot-like education of the masses, reformist trade unionism, etc., fitted naturally into the capitalist scheme of things everywhere.
By the same principle, the Soviet Union now forecasts the general outlines of the new social order that the world is approaching. The Soviet system was not an invention. Its basic institutions arose naturally from the economic and political necessities of workers and peasants freeing themselves from capitalist exploitation. Thus, for the United States as well as other countries, the Soviet Union is a plain indicator of the society that is to be, taking into account minor variations for special conditions in the several lands. It foreshadows the broad lines along which the future Soviet America will develop. Here our task is not to work out all the details of an American Soviet system, as that would exceed the scope of this book, but to trace out, upon the basis of actual experience to date, the general structure and workings of such a regime.
From capitalism to Communism, through the intermediary stage of Socialism; that is the way American society, like society in general, is headed. It represents the main line of march of the human race to the next higher social stage in its historical advance. It is the trend to which all the economic, political and social forces of today are contributing. The American revolution, when the workers have finally seized power, will develop even more swiftly in all its phases than has the Russian revolution. This is because in the United States objective conditions are more ripe for revolution than they were in old Russia. In his work, Imperialism, Lenin states:
“Capitalism, in its imperialist phase, arrives at the threshold of the complete socialization of production. To some extent it causes the capitalists, whether they like it or no, to enter a new social order, which marks the transition from free competition to the socialization of production. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few.”
This means that in such a highly-industrialized country as the United States the industrial base for Socialism is already at hand. The great problem before the workers is to get the political power. The Russian workers, however, not only had to conquer power but also to build a great industrial system. At the Eighth Congress of Soviets, in 1920, Lenin declared that, “Communism is the Soviet power plus the electrification of the country.” In the United States, the problem of the American working class in achieving Socialism may be summed up, as Browder has put it, as the present American industrial technique plus Soviets.
Besides this more favorable industrial base, American workers, once in control, will have other advantages which will greatly speed the tempo of revolutionary development. These are, first, the vast experience accumulated in the Russian revolution, and, second, the practical assistance of the Soviet governments existing at the time of the American revolution. These are enormous advantages. As for the Russian workers, they were pioneers blazing the revolutionary trail. They had to work out for themselves a maze of unique problems and to struggle against a whole hostile capitalist world. The sum of all which is that the period of transition from capitalism to Socialism in the United Soviet States will be much shorter and easier than in the U.S.S.R.
The American Soviet Government
WHEN the American working class actively enters the revolutionary path of abolishing capitalism it will orientate upon the building of Soviets, not upon the adaptation of the existing capitalist government. Capitalist governments have nothing in common with proletarian governments. They are especially constructed throughout to maintain the rulership of the bourgeoisie. In the revolutionary struggle they are smashed and Soviet governments established, built according to the requirements of the toiling masses.
The building of Soviets is begun not after the revolution but before. When the eventual revolutionary crisis becomes acute the workers begin the establishment of Soviets. The Soviets are not only the foundation of the future Workers’ State, but also the main instruments to mobilize the masses for revolutionary struggle. The decisions of the Soviets are enforced by the armed Red Guard of the workers and peasants and by the direct seizure of the industry through factory committees. A revolutionary American working class will follow this general course, which is the way of proletarian revolution.
The American Soviet government will be organized along the broad lines of the Russian Soviets. Local Soviets, the base of the whole Soviet State, will be established in all cities, towns and villages. Local Soviets combine in themselves the legislative, executive and judicial functions. Representation, based on occupation instead of residence and property, comes directly from the shops, mines, farms, schools, workers’ organizations, army, navy, etc. The principle of recall of representatives applies throughout. Citizenship is restricted to those who do useful work, capitalists, landlords, clericals and other non-producers being disfranchised.
The local Soviets will be combined by direct representation into county, state, and national Soviets. The national Soviet government, with its capital in Chicago or some other great industrial center, will consist of a Soviet Congress, made up of local delegates and meeting annually, or as often as need be, to work out the general policies of the government. Between its meetings the government will be carried on by a broad Central Executive Committee, meeting every few months. This C.E.C. will elect a small Presidium and a Council of Commissars, made up of the heads of the various government departments, who will carry on the day-to-day work.
The American Soviet government will join with the other Soviet governments in a world Soviet Union. There will also be, very probably, some form of continental union. The American revolution will doubtless carry with it all those countries of the three Americas that have not previously accomplished the revolution.
The Soviet court system will be simple, speedy and direct. The judges, chosen by the corresponding Soviets, will be responsible to them. The Supreme Court, instead of being dictatorial and virtually legislative, as in the United States, will be purely juridical and entirely under the control of the C.E.C. The civil and criminal codes will be simplified, the aim being to proceed directly and quickly to a correct decision. In the acute stages of the revolutionary struggle special courts to fight the counter-revolution will probably be necessary. The pest of lawyers will be abolished. The courts will be class-courts, definitely warring against the class enemies of the toilers. They will make no hypocrisy like capitalist courts, which, while pretending to deal out equal justice to all classes, in reality are instruments of the capitalist State for the repression and exploitation of the toiling masses.
The American Soviet government will be the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Chapter II we explained this dictatorship as the revolutionary government of the workers and toiling farmers. In the proletarian dictatorship the working class is the leader by virtue of its revolutionary program, superior organization and greater numbers. Towards the farmers, the attitude of the government will vary from an open alliance with the poor farmers and cooperation with the middle farmers, to open hostility against the big, exploiting landowners. Towards the city intelligentsia and petty bourgeoisie generally, its attitude will be one of friendliness and cooperation, insofar as these elements break with the old order and support the new. The new Workers’ government, as part of its task of building Socialism, necessarily will have to hold firmly in check the counter-revolutionary elements who seek to overthrow or sabotage the new regime. To suppose that the powerful American capitalist class and its vast numbers of hangers-on will tamely submit to the loss of their power to the workers would be to ignore the whole history of that class. The mildness or severity of the repressive measures used by the workers to liquidate this class politically will depend directly upon the character of the latter’s resistance. While the whole trend of the revolutionary workers is against violence, they always have an iron fist for counter-revolution.
In order to defeat the class enemies of the revolution, the counter-revolutionary intrigues within the United States and the attacks of foreign capitalist countries from without, the proletarian dictatorship must be supported by the organized armed might of the workers, soldiers, local militia, etc. In the early stages of the revolution, even before the seizure of power, the workers will organize the Red Guard. Later on this loosely constructed body becomes developed into a firmly-knit, well-disciplined Red Army.
The leader of the revolution in all its stages is the Communist party. With its main base among the industrial workers, the Party makes a bloc with the revolutionary farmers and impoverished city petty bourgeoisie, drawing under its general leadership such revolutionary groups and organizations as these classes may have. Under the dictatorship all the capitalist parties—Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Socialist, etc.—will be liquidated, the Communist party functioning alone as the Party of the toiling masses. Likewise, will be dissolved all other organizations that are political props of the bourgeois rule, including chambers of commerce, employers’ associations, rotary clubs, American Legion, Y.M.C.A., and such fraternal orders as the Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, Knights of Columbus, etc.
A Soviet government will provide the workers and poor farmers with the political instrument necessary to defend their interests. The whole purpose of such a government will be to advance the welfare of those who do useful work. This is not the case with the present government of the United States. It is dominated by the Morgans, Mellons and other big bankers and industrialists. Its function is to protect the interests of the capitalist class—in first line finance capital—at the expense of the working masses. Every piece of legislation, every strike, every demonstration of the unemployed illustrates this afresh. In no matter what field, wherever the interests of the workers are involved, they find the powers of the government arrayed against them. The American government is as much the property of the capitalists as their mills, mines, factories and land. Only a Soviet government can and will represent the will of the workers.
The establishment of an American Soviet government will mark the birth of real democracy in the United States. For the first time the toilers will be free, with industry and the government in their own hands. Now they are enslaved: the industries and the government are the property of the ruling class. The right to vote and all the current talk about democracy are only so many screens to hide the capitalist autocracy and to make it more palatable to the masses. Consider the economic and political gulf between the Southern textile workers slaving for $5 a week and the rich Southern capitalists; between the hungry unemployed workers in the Northern cities and the fat capitalist parasite masters lolling the Winters through at Palm Beach; between the semi-slave Negroes in the South and their exploiters; between the outrageous treatment visited upon Mooney and Billings, Sacco and Vanzetti and many other class war prisoners and the protection given to the Falls, Daughertys and the whole clique of capitalist robbers of the poor—then one gets the true measure of the American capitalist “democracy” and “freedom.” Ambassador Gerard blurted out the truth that the American government is a capitalist dictatorship when he declared that 59 bankers and captains of industry are the real rulers of the United States.
The Liberation of the Negro
THE CAPITALIST class not only robs the workers as a whole, but it visits special exploitation upon those sections of the working class—Negroes, foreign-born, women, youth, the aged, etc.—who, for one reason or another, are the least able to defend themselves in the class struggle. The American Soviet government will drastically eliminate such special discrimination, along with capitalist exploitation generally.
Above all, as we have remarked, it is the Negro who is singled out for the bitterest exploitation and persecution by the capitalists. His condition is comparable only to that of the “untouchables” of India and is the most crying outrage of American capitalism. He is set apart as a pariah, an object of contempt and scorn, a victim of the most systematic suppression and enslavement to be found anywhere in the modern industrial world.
The purpose of all this tyranny and repression is, of course, the most intense robbery of the Negro toilers; for the vast majority of Negroes are either poor farmers or workers. The Jim-Crow system, with all its cultivated snobbery of race, is a device of the ruling classes to whip extra profits out of the hides of the oppressed Negroes by splitting them off from the rest of the toilers.
The Republican party, boasted friend of the Negro, is equally responsible with the Democratic party for the maintenance of this criminal outrage. Such Negro organizations as the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, dominated by the white and Negro capitalists and petty bourgeoisie, also have this responsibility; they live by cultivating segregationalism; they sabotage every real fight for the liberation of the Negro. In the case of the framedup nine Scottsboro Negro boys, the attorney of the N.A.A.C.P. made a purely formal defense, practically coinciding with the prosecution.
As for the American Federation of Labor, its record on the Negro question is one of shame and treachery; it falls into step with the whole capitalist policy by barring Negroes from its unions, by blocking their entry into the better-paid jobs, by refusing to fight for their burning demands, by cultivating the insidious white chauvinism. The measure of the policy of the A.F. of L. on the Negro question is to be seen, for example, in Atlanta, where Negroes are not even allowed to enter the local labor temple.
The Socialist party, despite all its parade of radicalism and alleged friendship of the Negro, follows the same basic Jim-Crow line as the A.F. of L. This was clearly shown by Heywood Broun, Socialist leader, when he said:
“If I were a candidate for high executive office, or judiciary office, I would say, even without being cornered, that I would not now sanction the efforts to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.”5
The Communist party, alone of all the political parties, fights for the liberation of the Negro, both in the present-day struggle and as an ultimate goal. The American Soviet government, immediately it takes power, will deal a shattering blow to the whole monstrous Jim-Crowism. To destroy it ruthlessly will be one of the real joys of the victorious proletarian revolution. Every remnant of slavery will be abolished. In a Soviet system, the Negro will have the most complete equality—economically, politically, socially. The doors to every occupation, to every social activity, will be wide open for him. He will have ample land, confiscated from the great white landlords. He will be free to do and go as any other citizen, without let or hindrance. Attempts to maintain the capitalist white chauvinism and ostracism of the Negroes will be punished as a serious crime against society. Socialism will mean the first real freedom for the Negro. He is beginning to realize this, hence his mass turning to the Communist party for leadership, and the consequent deep alarm of the capitalists and big landowners at this growing unity of white and black toilers.
The status of the American Negro is that of an oppressed national minority, and only a Soviet system can solve the question of such minorities. This it does, in addition to setting up real equality in the general political and social life, by establishing the right of self-determination for national minorities in those parts of the country where they constitute the bulk of the population. The constitution of the Soviet Union provides that, “Each united republic retains the right of free withdrawal from the Union.” The Program of the Communist International declares for:
“The recognition of the right of all nations, irrespective of race, to complete self-determination, that is, self-determination inclusive of the right to State separation.”
Accordingly, the right of self-determination will apply to Negroes in the American Soviet system. In the so-called Black Belt of the South, where the Negroes are in the majority, they will have the fullest right to govern themselves and also such white minorities as may live in this section. The same principle will apply to all the colonial and semi-colonial peoples now dominated by American imperialism in Cuba, the Philippines, Central and South America, etc.
And logically, foreign-born workers, now denied the right to vote and ruthlessly deported, will enjoy the fullest rights of citizenship. One of the most monstrous features of the present attack upon the working class is the deportation of tens of thousands of foreign-born workers by Doak’s Department of Labor. These masses of workers, torn away from home and families, are sent back to countries with which they have lost all touch. Doak’s deportation campaign, part of the capitalist offensive, is an attempt to terrorize the foreign-born workers, to crush every semblance of resistance among them, to split them off from the American-born workers. The wholesale deportation of radical workers and leaders is an attempt to illegalize the Communist party and the TUUL.
The experience with self-determination of national minorities in the Soviet Union shows that the Russians have solved this problem with the revolution. The many national minorities have the right of self-determination; they have their own languages, their own culture. Yet they all live together in the strongest unity under the general constitution of the U.S.S.R. Where there is no capitalist or feudal exploitation there can be no suppression of weaker nationalities. The radical liquidation of the “insoluble” Jewish problem in the U.S.S.R. testifies to the completeness of the Bolshevik cure. Murderous pogroms, a curse of old Russia, are now totally eradicated. The Jews enjoy absolute equality with all other nationalities. The solution of the question of suppressed nationalities, a question which causes untold misery in the capitalist world, is one of the greatest achievements of the Russian revolution.
The American Soviet will, of course, abolish all restrictions upon racial intermarriage. The arguments of Ku Klux Klanners and the like that Negroes are an inferior race and that “mongrel” peoples are less capable, have no justification in science and social experience. Those “scientists” who endorse such “white supremacy” theories are only so many bought-and-paid-for upholders of the prevailing mode of exploitation. The facts are that all the big peoples of today are already hopelessly “mongrel” and that wherever Negroes have half a chance they demonstrate their intellectual equality with the whites. Geographic isolation of the early human stock into widely separated groups brought about its differentiation into individual races; contact between these various races, bred of modern industrialization, is just as irresistibly breaking down these racial differences and bringing about racial amalgamation. The revolution will only hasten this process of integration, already proceeding throughout the world with increasing tempo.
The Emancipation of Woman
WHEN woman emerged historically from feudalism she was burdened with a whole series of customs, prejudices and restrictions enslaving her in her work, her personal life and her political status. Characteristically capitalism, which respects nothing in its greed for profits, quickly seized upon all these handicaps of woman and used them to doubly exploit her. This is true of the United States as well as other capitalist countries. The so-called freedom of the American woman is a myth. Either she is a gilded butterfly bourgeois parasite or she is an oppressed slave.
The life of the working class woman and poor farmer’s wife is one of drudgery and exploitation. Capitalism sees in her mainly a breeder of wage slaves and soldiers. The boasted American home, enslaving the woman through her economic inferiority and her children, makes her dependent upon her husband. On all sides she confronts medieval sex taboos, assiduously cultivated by the church, State and bourgeois moralists. When she goes into industry she has to toil for from a third to a half less than the male worker; she works at a killing pace under unhealthful conditions and she is barred from many occupations under the hypocritical and reactionary slogan, “The woman’s place is in the home”; the A.F. of L. betrays her every attempt to organize and to defend her interests. Politically, she is practically a zero, having little or no opportunity to educate herself or to function in an organized manner. Finally, to cap the climax of woman’s enslavement, capitalism maintains in full blast the “oldest profession,” prostitution.
The proletarian revolution will profoundly change all this. The American Soviet government will immediately set about liquidating the elaborate network of slavery in which woman is enmeshed. She will be freed economically, politically and socially. The U.S.S.R. shows the general lines along which the emancipation of woman will also proceed in a Soviet America.
The Russian woman is free economically, and this is the foundation of all her freedom. Every field of activity is open to her. She is to be found even in such occupations as locomotive engineer, electrical crane operator, machinist, factory director, etc. There are women generals in the Red Army, women ambassadors, etc. Two-thirds of the medical students are women. In industry the women are thoroughly organized in the trade unions. They get the same pay as men, and are protected by an elaborate system of maternity and other social insurance. In politics the women of the Soviet Union are a major and militant factor.
The Russian woman is also free in her sex life. When married life becomes unwelcome for a couple they are not barbarously compelled to live together. Divorce is to be had for the asking by one or both parties. The woman’s children are recognized as legitimate by the State and society, whether born in official wedlock or not. The free American woman, like her Russian sister, will eventually scorn the whole fabric of bourgeois sex hypocrisy and prudery.
In freeing the woman, Socialism liquidates the drudgery of housework. So important do Communists consider this question that the Communist International deals with it in its world program. In the Soviet Union the attack upon housework slavery is delivered from every possible angle. Great factory kitchens are being set up to prepare hot, well-balanced meals for home consumption by the millions; communal kitchens in apartment houses are organized widespread. Every device to simplify and reduce housework is spread among the masses with all possible dispatch.
To free the woman from the enslavement of the perpetual care of her children is also a major object of Socialism. To this end in the Soviet Union there is being developed the most elaborate system of kindergartens and playgrounds in the world—in the cities and villages, in the neighborhoods and around the factories. Of this development, Anna Razamova says:
“All these institutions for child welfare mean a great deal in the life of the working woman. They free her from the necessity of spending all her time at home, cleaning, cooking and mending. While she is at work she can be sure that her child is being well taken care of, and that it is supervized by trained nurses and teachers, and gets wholesome food at regular hours.”6
The free Russian woman is the trail blazer for the toiling women of the world. She is beating out a path which, ere long, her American sister will begin to follow.
Unshackling the Youth
A RULING class which did not hesitate to send more than twelve million young men to their death in the World War to further its greed for wealth and power, naturally does not stick at the most ruthless exploitation of the youth at all other times. Capitalism, whose great god is profit, poisons society at its source; it destroys the seed corn of the human race, the young.
The condition of the children of the American working class is a damning indictment of capitalism. Recently even President Hoover admitted that in the United States, the richest country in the world, 6,000,000 children are chronically undernourished. The starved masses of workers, harassed by low wages and unemployment, are unable to feed their children properly, and the State callously shrugs its shoulders at the problem. Great masses of them slave in the industries, while their parents go around jobless. The position of the workers’ children has naturally grown immeasurably worse during the present industrial crisis. The Nation, (Mar. 23, 1932), exposes a typical condition when it declares: “5,000 to 10,000 children in Detroit are daily in child bread lines.” Regarding a recent investigation of conditions among continuation school boys in New York, Grace Hutchens states:
“Of 2,700 working boys, less than one in seven was found free from physical defects. One-fifth of them were under-weight from under-nourishment. Three-fifths needed dental care. Defective eyesight, adenoids, undeveloped chest, poor muscle tone, diseased tonsils, anemia, heart conditions, and tuberculosis scars were common. Most of these difficulties could have been prevented.”7
The Labour Research Association says in its Bulletin of Nov. 9, 1931:
“In Detroit, in a single school in the working class district, 500 children refused to report for classes. Investigation showed that more than half of them lacked even clothes and shoes. In Chicago, children are fainting from lack of food and 15,000 are starving. In Cleveland, the number of under-nourished children in the elementary schools will reach 15,000 before the end of the present term. A recent study of 290 typical children in West Virginia coal towns by Dr. Ruth Fox of the Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City, showed that in Ward, W. Va., their average weight was 12% below the standard.”
The generally disastrous effects of such conditions may be better imagined than described. Capitalism, besides thus feeding, vampire-like upon children, no less ruthlessly exploits the youth, who are becoming an ever-greater factor in industry. It drives their immature bodies at a pace in production which even adult workers cannot endure; it forces them to work at lower wages than grownups; child labor laws are “more honored in the breach than in the observance.” Special victims in this raw exploitation are the Negro youth.
Such barbarous conditions for the youth are, of course, utterly alien to Socialism. Just as inevitably as a profit-seeking, anarchic, socially-irresponsible capitalism ruins the young of the people, so inevitably, does an ordered and responsible Socialism take the greatest care of its youth. In the very center of the whole Communist program stands the systematic protection and development of the children and young workers. Even the sharpest enemies of the Soviet Union have to admit the truth of this. Not even in the darkest days of the civil war, when hunger and pestilence were rampant, was the welfare of the youth ever lost sight of in the U.S.S.R. They always had plenty, although often their parents were semi-starved. A bourgeois correspondent, Julia Blanshard, says:
“Youth is one of the first concerns of Soviet Russia. You, as an elder, might live on cabbage soup, but your children would have meat stews and even sweets. Russia looks to the future, not the past. . . The children look clean, well-nourished, neatly dressed and alert.”8
Under Socialism the care of the children rests directly with the parents—stories of the nationalization of children in the Soviet Union are ridiculous. But the State does not let matters rest entirely with the parents. It throws such additional safeguards around the children in the schools, kindergartens, etc., of city and village that none can possibly go hungry, be denied medical care or lack education.
The Soviet government, the trade unions and the Communist Youth League, as well as the Party and other organizations, vigilantly protect the youth employed in Russian industry. The general conditions they have set up indicate the lines of development in the United States. There is no industrial child labor. And such driving as exists among the millions of young workers in American industries is unheard of. The Russian young workers work only six hours daily; they are shielded from night work and especially dangerous or heavy toil. The Soviet Union is the only country in the world where the youth are paid equal wage rates with adults for similar work. The health and education of the young workers is promoted by vast sport and cultural organizations. In politics the youth are a real factor, the franchise being based upon the principle, “Old enough to work, old enough to vote.” In every walk in life the antiquated prejudices that the “elders” alone must lead have been broken down and the path is clear for the development of full leadership on the basis of ability and regardless of age. In the United States, as in the U.S.S.R., the Soviet system will open up a new world for the youth.
The Cultural Revolution in the United States
PRESENT-DAY culture in this country is an instrument by which the capitalist class consolidates its dominant position. The prevailing systems of education, morality, ethics, science, art, patriotism, religion, etc., are as definitely parts of capitalist exploitation as the stock exchange. The schools, churches, newspapers, motion pictures, radio, theatres and various other avenues of publicity and mass instruction are the organized propaganda machinery of the ruling class.
The chief aims of bourgeois culture, so far as it is directed towards the working class, are to develop the workers into, (1) slave-like robots who will accept uncomplainingly whatever standards of life and work the owners of industry see fit to grant them; (2) unthinking soldiers who will enthusiastically get themselves killed off in defense of their masters’ rulership; (3) superstitious dolts who will satisfy themselves with a promise of paradise after death as a substitute for a decent life here on earth. To these ends the workers are regimented in the schools, poisoned by the militaristic Boy Scouts and C.M.T.C., enmeshed in fascist-like sport organizations, herded into the strike-breaking Y.M.C.A., stuffed with endless rot in the newspapers and movies, jammed into religious training before they are able to think for themselves, etc. As for real education, about all the workers get of it in school is the minimum of the three R’s required to enable them to perform the tasks allotted them in industry.
So far as this culture is directed to the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, it results in a mass production of capitalist intellectual robots. The schools and colleges, firmly in the grip of finance capital, as Upton Sinclair so completely showed in his book, The Goose Step, are great manufactories of Babbitts. In no country is culture so debased by capitalism as in the United States. Essentially a gigantic effort to perpetuate the robbery of the workers, it is sterile, hypocritical, colorless, lifeless. America’s capitalistic writers are engaged in trying to convince the working class what a glorious thing it is to be a wage slave; her artists and poets are busy glorifying Heinz’s pickles and the advertising pages of The Saturday Evening Post; her dramatists and musicians are cooking up patriotic slush and idiotic sex stories to divert the masses from their troubles and the hopeless boredom of capitalist life; her scientists are trying to prove the unity of science and religion, etc., etc.
The proletarian revolution in the United States will at once make a devastating slash into this maze of hypocrisy and intellectual rubbish. Not less than in the Soviet Union, it will usher in a profound cultural revolution. For the first time in history the toiling masses will have the opportunity to know and enjoy the good things of life. With prosperity assured for all, with no slave class to stultify intellectually and with no system of exploitation to defend, Communist culture will have a mass base and will flourish luxuriantly and free. It will call forth the artistic and intellectual powers of the masses, always hitherto repressed by chattel slavery, feudalism and capitalism. Superstition, and ignorance will vanish in a realm of science; “Culture will become the acquirement of all and the class ideologies of the past will give place to scientific materialist philosophy.”9
Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following; the schools, colleges and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and the general ethics of the new Socialist society. Present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy.
The churches will remain free to continue their services, but their special tax and other privileges will be liquidated. Their buildings will revert to the State. Religious schools will be abolished and organized religious training for minors prohibited. Freedom will be established for anti-religious propaganda.
The whole basis and organization of capitalist science will be revolutionized. Science will become materialistic, hence truly scientific; God will be banished from the laboratories as well as from the schools. Science will be thoroughly organized and will work according to plan; instead of the present individualistic hit-or-miss scientific dabbling, there will be a great organization of science, backed by the full power of the government. This organization will make concerted attacks upon the central problems, concrete and abstract, that confront science.
The press, the motion picture, the radio, the theatre, will be taken over by the government. They will be cleansed of their present trash of sex, crime, sensationalism and general babbitry, and developed into institutions of real education and art; into purveyors of the interesting, dramatic, and amusing in life. The press will, through workers’ correspondents on the Russian lines, become the actual voice of the people, not simply the forum of professional writers.
The American Soviet government will, of course, give the greatest possible stimulus to art in every form, seeking to cultivate the latent powers of the masses. Painting, sculpture, literature, music—every form of artistic expression—will flourish as never before. The great art treasures of the rich will be confiscated and assembled in museums for the enjoyment and instruction of the toiling masses. Cultural societies of all kinds will be developed energetically.
One of the basic concerns of the workers’ government will be, naturally, the conservation of the health of the masses. To this end a national Department of Health will be set up, with the necessary local and State sub-divisions. A free medical service, based upon the most scientific principles, will be established. The people will be taught how to live correctly. They will be given mass instruction in diet, physical culture, etc. A last end will be put to capitalist medical quackery and the adulteration of food.
A main task of the American Soviet government will be to make the cities liveable. This will involve not only the wholesale destruction of the shacks that millions of workers now call homes, but the building over of the congested capitalist cities into roomy Socialist towns. These will develop towards the decentralization of industry and population, the breaking down of the differences between city and country. There will be no great landed, financial, and transportation interests to maintain the monstrous congestion typical of capitalist cities. The present “city beautiful” plans of capitalism will seem puny and trivial to the future city builders of Socialism.
Only a few years ago many of the foregoing proposals would have seemed fantastic, merely Utopian dreams. But now we can see them growing into actuality in the Soviet Union. In making the cultural revolution in the United States, the workers and farmers, facing the same general problems as the Russians, will solve them along similar lines.
Curing Crime and Criminals
CAPITALISM, by its very nature, is a prolific breeder of crime. It is a system of legalized robbery of the working class. The whole process of capitalist business is a swindle and an armed hold-up. In capitalist society what constitutes crime and what does not is a purely arbitrary distinction. The capitalists do not recognize any line of demarcation for themselves. They do whatever they can “get away with.” The record of every large fortune and big corporation in this country is smeared not only with brutal robbery of the workers but also statutory crime of every description, from the bribery of legislatures to plain murder. Wall Street is full of uncaught Kreugers.
In a society where each grabs what he can at the expense of the rest, naturally the government offers a wide field of corruption. It is a well-known fact, emphasized afresh by the Seabury investigation in New York, that every city and State in this country is controlled by grafting politicians, allied with the criminal underworld. The Teapot Dome scandal, not to mention numerous others, shows that the national government is also permeated with this gross corruption. Such corruption is not a special condition, but of the very tissue of capitalism.
It is not surprising that in a system of society where the aim is to get rich by any means, crime of every kind should flourish. Faced by low wages and other impossible economic conditions on the one hand and by the corrupt example of capitalism generally on the other, many naturally take to lives of open crime and try to seize at the point of a gun what the capitalist “big shots” steal through exploiting the workers, by a corner on the stock exchange, or by corrupting the government. The main difference between their operations is primarily one of dimension. Al Capone is an altogether legitimate child of American capitalism, and it is no accident that he is an object of such widespread admiration.
The American Soviet government will liquidate the mounting crime wave which, according to the Wickersham committee, costs the government a billion dollars yearly. Socialism, by putting an end to capitalist exploitation, deals a mortal blow at crime of every description. The economic base of crime is destroyed. The worker is enabled to live and work under the best possible conditions. There is no place for human sharks to prey upon their fellow men. Not only does the abolition of capitalism destroy the basis of the so-called crimes against property, but the revolutionized economic and social conditions, involving an intelligent moral code and effective educational system, also greatly diminish the “crimes of passion.”
These facts are already demonstrated in the Soviet Union, which is fast becoming a crimeless country. While the exigencies of the revolutionary struggle against the counter-revolution made it necessary, from time to time, to confine a considerable number of political prisoners, this need is now fast passing with the consolidation of the Socialist regime and the liquidation of the last remnants of the exploiting classes in the Soviet Union. Life and property are safer now in the U.S.S.R. than in any other country in the world. Crime is rapidly sinking into abeyance and this will be more and more the case as the new society becomes strengthened.
Capitalism blames crime upon the individual, instead of upon the bad social conditions which produce it. Hence its treatment of crime is essentially one of punishment. But the failure of its prisons, with their terrible sex-starvation, graft, over-crowding, idleness, stupid discipline, ferociously long sentences and general brutality, is overwhelmingly demonstrated by the rapidly mounting numbers of prisoners and the long list of terrible prison riots. Capitalist prisons are actually schools of crime. Even the standpat Wickersham committee had to condemn the atrocious American prison system as brutal, medieval and fruitless.
Socialist criminology, on the other hand, attacks the bad social conditions. While the American Soviet government will ruthlessly break up the underworld gangs that brazenly infest all American cities and will also give short shrift to grafting politicians, its prison system will be essentially educational in character. In the new Russian prisons, for example, the prisoners have the right to marry and to live with their families; they are taught useful trades and are paid full union wages for their work; there are no guards or walls or bars; the discipline is organized entirely by the prisoners themselves. The prisoners are also allowed freely to visit their friends in other towns. The lengths of the terms to be served are determined by the prisoners’ committees, on the basis of the fitness of the given prisoners to resume their places in society. The whole terminology of crime, criminal, prison, etc., has been abandoned in such institutions. Upon release, a prisoner is not only able to make his way in society but is welcomed. He is eligible to belong to the Communist party. It requires very little imagination to see the great advantages of this Socialist system over the barbarous prisons of capitalist countries. Congressman W. I. Sirovich, (Dem., N. Y.), said, after a recent visit to the Soviet Union, “The Russian prison system sets an example that is worthy of emulation by any nation in the world.”10
Prohibition, based upon a criminal alliance between capitalists, crooked politicians and gangsters, has bred a growth of criminals such as the world has never seen before. And the “best minds” of the country stand powerless before the problem. The American Soviet government will deal with this question by eliminating prohibition, by establishing government control of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquors; these measures to be supported by an energetic campaign among the masses against excessive drinking.
This way of handling the prohibition question is working successfully in the Soviet Union. Shortly after the October revolution the Soviet government prohibited the sale or manufacture of alcoholic drinks. But soon bootlegging began, with familiar demoralizing consequences: poisonous liquor was made, much badly-needed grain was wasted, open violation of the law existed on all sides. Then, with characteristic vigor and clarity of purpose, the government legalized the making and selling of intoxicating beverages. At the same time, a big campaign was initiated by the government, the Party, the trade unions, etc., to educate the workers against alcoholism. This program is succeeding; the evils of alcoholism are definitely on the decline. Doubtless, the Russians have found the real solution of the liquor question. Just as Socialism is abolishing so many other evils, it is also rapidly wiping out alcoholism and the mass of misery and degradation that accompanies it.
The Abolition of War
ONE OF the revolutionary achievements of victorious world Communism will be the ending of war. In Chapter I we have seen the great and growing danger of a new world war and also the utter futility of all the capitalist peace pacts and disarmament schemes as war preventives. We have also seen the economic forces of imperialism behind the war danger. So long as capitalism lasts war must continue to curse the human race. It is the historical task of the proletariat to put an end to this hoary monster. This it will do by destroying the capitalist system and with it the economic causes that bring about war.
It is characteristic of capitalism to justify all the robbery and misery and terrors of its system by seeking to create the impression that they are caused by basic traits in human nature, or even by “acts of god.” Thus we find current many metaphysical and mysterious explanations of the present crisis and unemployment. These preventable disasters are made to appear almost as natural phenomena over which mankind has no control, like tornadoes and earthquakes. The same general attitude is taken with regard to war. War is put forth as arising out of the very nature of humanity. Man is pictured as a war-like animal, and therefore capitalism escapes responsibility. War becomes more or less inevitable.
This is all nonsense, of course. Man is by nature a gregarious and friendly animal. He does not make war because he dislikes others of his own species, differing from him in language, religion, geographical location, etc. His wars have always arisen out of struggles over the very material things of wealth and power. This is true, whether he has been living in a tribal, slave, feudal or capitalist economy, and whether he has obscured the true cause of his wars with an intense religious garb or with slogans about making the world safe for democracy. The cause of modern war is, as we have already seen, the imperialistic policies of the capitalist nations to rob the colonial peoples, to smash back the growing revolutionary movement, to crush each other in the world struggle for markets, raw materials and territory. In a society in which there is no private property in industry and land, in which no exploitation of the workers takes place and where plenty is produced for all, there can be no grounds for war. The interests of a Socialist society are fundamentally opposed to the murderous and unnatural struggle of international war.
Under capitalism the workers, by militant and well-organized struggle, can check the development of war. By the threat of revolution they can, for a time, force the capitalists to hold in leash their dogs of war. This fear has contributed basically to holding the capitalist governments so long from making another open armed attack upon the Soviet Union. But pressure from the workers can only delay the war, not stop it permanently. The irresistible and incurable antagonisms of the capitalist countries inevitably force them into war, revolution or no revolution. Only the proletarian revolution itself can solve these war-breeding contradictions and put a final end to war. Not Christianity but Communism will bring peace on earth.
A Communist world will be a unified, organized world. The economic system will be one great organization, based upon the principle of planning now dawning in the U.S.S.R. The American Soviet government will be an important section in this world organization. In such a society there will be no tariffs or the many other barriers erected by capitalism against a free world interchange of goods. The raw material supplies of the world will be at the disposition of the peoples of the world.
Politically, the world will be organized. There will be no colonies, no “spheres of influence,” no hypocritical “open doors.” The toilers will then have fully realized Marx’s famous slogan, “Workingmen of the World, Unite!” The interests of the toiling masses in the various countries will not be in conflict, but in harmony with each other. Those who speak of “red imperialism” repeat the calumnies of capitalism. Once the power of the bourgeoisie is broken internationally and its States destroyed, the world Soviet Union will develop towards a scientific administration of things, as Engels describes. There will be no place for the present narrow patriotism, the bigoted nationalist chauvinism that serves so well the capitalist warmakers. Armies and navies, rendered obsolete, will be disbanded. Grim war will meet its Waterloo.
At the meeting of the League of Nations’ Preparatory Commission for Disarmament at Geneva in November, 1927, the representatives of the Soviet Union presented a proposal for complete world disarmament. It was later re-enforced by the Soviet Union’s proposal for a general economic non-aggression pact, by its non-aggression treaties with individual governments, and by its generally firm peace policy in the face of imperialist provocation.
But, of course, the imperialist capitalist nations did not accept the Soviet Union’s plan for doing away with war. The U.S.S.R. is the only country that genuinely struggles for peace; the capitalist powers need war in their business. War is not to be ended in capitalist peace conferences, but by revolutionary struggle of the toiling masses against capitalism itself. Hence, inevitably, the capitaists at Geneva ridiculed the Soviet 1927 proposals and shortly afterwards adopted as a substitute the supremely hypocritical Kellogg Peace Pact, meanwhile intensifying their own war preparations. They have again rejected the Soviet Union’s disarmament proposal at the present Geneva conference. Thereby they expose afresh to the workers of the world the fact that they do not want peace, but war. It will be only when the workers and peasants have finally defeated international capitalism and are assembled to re-organize the world on a Socialist basis that a proposal for general disarmament will be adopted and carried into effect. This event, being irresistibly prepared by the deepening capitalist crisis and the growing mobilization of the world’s toilers under the leadership of the Communist International, will take place sooner than the world bourgeoisie dare think and it will be one of the very greatest steps forward ever taken by the human race.
Socialist Incentive
ONE OF the classical capitalist arguments against Socialism is that it would destroy incentive; that is, if private property in industry and the right to exploit the workers were abolished the urge for social progress, and even for day-to-day production, would be killed.
But the Russian revolution has shattered this contention irreparably. The Russian workers and peasants are building Socialism with a mass energy and enthusiasm quite unparalleled in history. Manifestly, they are propelled by a great incentive. This is a marvel to the bourgeois newspaper correspondents. But it is just as Marx, three gen erations ago, said it would be under Socialism.
The incentive of the Russian toilers is easily explained. They own the country and everything in it. There is no exploiting class to rob them of the fruits of their toil. They welcome better production methods because they get the full benefit of them. They have broken the chain of capitalist slavery and are building a new world of liberty, prosperity and happiness for themselves and families. It is equally understandable why the producing masses in capitalist countries betray no such enthusiasm in their work. The latter are robbed of what they produce; for them improvements in production mean wage-cuts and unemployment. Incentive under capitalism is confined practically to the exploiting classes and their hangers-on. It is only with the advent of Socialism that the great masses develop real incentive.
Socialist incentive in the Soviet Union explains why the workers so militantly defended the revolution against the many capitalist armies in 1918-20, and why they have endured famine and pestilence for the revolution. In the industries it is an intelligent mass incentive that provides the basis for the keen Socialist competition, for shock-brigades to speed production, for the self-imposed labor discipline, for the heroic present-day selfdenial in putting the Five-Year Plan into effect so that a solid base of heavy industry may be quickly laid for the Socialist prosperity.
In view of all this mass interest and initiative of the workers in Soviet industry current capitalist charges about “forced labor” in the U.S.S.R. stand exposed as ridiculous. Forced labor is native to capitalism, not Socialism. The whole Socialist system is utterly antagonistic to any enslavement of the workers. Even bourgeois writers and politicians are beginning to admit this. H. R. Mussey says: “If anybody wants a bargain in forced labor, or any other kind of labor, I should advise him not to look for it in Russia just now, as far as I have seen it; for it is a seller’s market in labor if ever there was one.”11 Rep. H. T. Rainey, Democratic House leader, declares: “Labor is freer in Russia than in any other country in the world.”12
The differentiated wage scales, including piecework, in the Soviet Union constitute no contradiction to the prevalent strong mass incentive. Temporarily, they must serve to stimulate the less conscious elements to acquire skill and to produce. The wage system as a whole is a hang-over from capitalism, part of the baggage that has to be discarded during the transition from capitalism to Communism. Improved production methods and general education will solve that problem. Recently Stalin said, in polemizing against tendencies to at once equalize wages:
“Marx and Lenin said that the differences between skilled and unskilled work would continue to exist even under Socialism and even after the classes had been annihilated, that only under Communism would this difference disappear, that therefore, even under Socialism Vages* must be paid according to the labor performed and not according to need.”13
Besides the revolutionary enthusiasm and initiative of the masses and many other indications already present of the eventual wageless system there is the “Party maximum.” That is, the members of the Communist party have a set wage limit above which they cannot go. Thus Stalin gets the same wages, as many hundreds of thousands of other workers and much less than large numbers of non- Party mechanics and engineers. “Russia,” says Stuart Chase, “has achieved more progress and developed more initiative on $150 a month, the official Party salary, than any other nation has ever dreamed of in an equal period.”14