The reason
for us recalling this quite remarkable Introduction by Engels is once again
that it presciently referred, with unmatchable perspicacity, to the essential
ingredients of the origin and formation of proto-totalitarian regimes in
accordance with our thesis on “the primacy of economics” in the first phase –
comprising the first two stages – of the historical evolution of these regimes.
To repeat, these ingredients are: - (a) the spread of capitalist enterprise;
(b) the rise of the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic political force within
integrated economic regions; (c) the formation of powerful nation-states with
their pervasive bureaucratic apparatus to govern and administer these economic
regions, including (d) sizeable standing armies capable of putting down any
uprising with overwhelming force. Yet, what Engels leaves out is what his
summary of the developments he lists actively implies about the politico-economic
evolution of class antagonism within advanced industrial capitalist industry
and society. These are crucial omissions the analysis of which, had Engels adverted
to them, would have greatly enhanced our understanding of the epochal upheavals
that were to afflict Europe and the entire world shortly after his death in
1895 – the same year in which this Introduction was written.
The first
major omission relates to Engels’s patent and perhaps ingenuous triumphalism
concerning what he thought was the relentless and unstoppable rise of social
democracy as a party-political force that would lead inexorably not just to the
triumph of socialism in a particular nation, but indeed to its almost imminent
triumph in all of Western Europe. In his fatidic forecast, Engels exhibited
further “errors” to be added to those he had already conceded with regard to
the development of capitalist bourgeois rule and the formation of nation-states
with powerful anti-insurrectionary standing armies. Essentially, Engels failed
to recognize that, despite their expanding parliamentary institutions, the very
bourgeois nation-states with their standing armies that Engels had identified
as the primary reason for the suppression of the 1848 insurrections and the
1871 Paris Commune – these same nation-states could and would incite
even more powerful nationalist movements able to defeat the progressive
social-democratic proletarian parties and indeed to divide them along nationalistic
lines, overriding thereby any “internationalist” solidarity then existing
between European working-class and proletarian organizations, both party-political
and syndicalist. In his Introduction Engels grossly overstates the ecumenical internationalist
strength and solidarity of the European workers’ and proletarian movement
whilst wholly neglecting the ability of bourgeois nation-states to instigate,
organize and orchestrate nationalist movements capable of exploiting economic
tensions between national bourgeoisies that could then erupt into open military
conflict. Indeed, the Franco-Prussian War ought to have been foremost in his mind
as a redoubtable omen of this quite open possibility.
Furthermore,
and this is the second omission, Engels – and in this he had at least the
partial excuse that Marx himself had never addressed specifically this
essential aspect of capitalist industrial strategy as an aspect of class
antagonism – entirely failed to grasp the implications of the tremendous
transformation of the industrial capitalist labour process which was to form
the basis of became known as the Second Industrial Revolution – namely, the
rapid rise of the “mass worker” (Ungelernt, unskilled) to replace the
“artisanal worker” (Gelernt, skilled) exacerbated by the rapid expansion
of Taylorism and then Fordism early in the twentieth century. Again, not
just Engels, but Marx himself had failed to address in any great detail the
importance of the class composition of the working class as the driving
force of capitalist industry reflected in the labour process.
Two levels
of omissions, then, one driving the other, representing the combined ability of
the capitalist bourgeoisie to drive divisions within the global working
class through what Marx himself called “the real subsumption of living
labour” in the process of production, and therefrom of distribution itself
through income policies. And then the ability of the capitalist bourgeoisies
organized around existing nation-states as optimal currency areas with
separate industrial and financial hinterlands, to sow and spread divisions between
separate working classes and their party-political organizations in their
external inter-national relations through the exasperation of nationalisms
around trade and cultural conflicts.
But a
corollary to these failures concerning (a) the potential division and
segmentation of the European working-class and proletarian movement along
labour-process industrial policies affecting its class composition – skilled,
unskilled, unemployed, petty-bourgeois -, and (b) the division within and
between proletarian movements along nationalist lines dictated by the organic
division of the capitalist class itself along economic regions governed by
nation-states – as a corollary and consequence of these realities, Engels
failed to perceive how the social-democratic political parties themselves
would become entangled and enlisted by the national bourgeoisies by means of
the existing nation-state institutions and bureaucracies in the administration
of the tremendous processes of industrial re-organization vital to the
transformation of capitalist industry broadly comprising what has come to be
known as the Second Industrial Revolution! Broadly described, then, we can now
number three levels of failures and errors to be added to the ones already
identified by Engels in his 1895 Introduction – failures and errors of analysis
that, and this is most important, were equally committed not just by Marx and
Engels themselves but indeed by the entirety of the European working-class and
proletarian movements from the First to the Second Socialist International to
the Third or Communist International under the auspices of the
Bolshevist-Leninist Party of the Soviet Union.
Our next
task will be therefore to draw the historico-materialist thread that leads the
political concentrate of the capitalist mode of production through its economic
categories, from the valorization of capital via the production process to its
realization in the circulation process, from the “formal subsumption of labour”
to its “real subsumption” utilizing the labour process as an antagonistic
strategy to weaken the composition of the working class and subject it to
capitalist command. Next, we trace the
subsequent evolution of capitalist enterprise from the concentration of workers
under one factory roof, to the concentration of capitals and the formation of
social capital by means of credit, finance and the average rate of profit.
These organic institutional features of capitalist command over living labour in
the production and distribution processes need to be linked next to the
establishment of capitalist command over a determinate territorial hinterland
related principally to the mobility of the labour force and the availability of
other resources for production as well as “markets” for the sale of
commodities. Control over this hinterland enables the formation of a bourgeois
class and the erection of a state-form or nation-state equipped with a strong
centralized bureaucracy and above all an imponent standing army to police the
economic hinterland. The obvious aim of this complex tracing of
politico-economic links is to establish a historical relation between incipient
capitalist enterprise and nation-state, and then between nation-state and
nationalism to enable us to present and enucleate a comprehensive theory of the
development of capitalist industry and society.
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