What is Marxism? by Emile Burns

Author:Emile Burns [Burns, Emile]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Communism, Dialectic, Frederick Engels, Karl Marx, Marxism, Materialism, Socialism
Publisher: Marxists Internet Archive
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6 SOCIALIST SOCIETY

Nowhere in Marx’s writings is there to be found a detailed account of the new social system which was to follow capitalism. Marx wrote no “Utopia” of the kind that earlier writers had produced – writings based only on the general idea of a society from which the more obvious evils of the society in which they lived had been removed. But from the general laws of social development Marx was able to outline the features of the new society and the way in which it would develop.

Perhaps the most a sense the most obvious, point made by Marx was that the organisation of the new society would not begin, so to speak, on a clearer field. Therefore it was futile to think in terms of a society “which has developed on its own foundations.” It was not a question of thinking out the highest possible number of good features and mixing them together to get the conception of a socialist society which we would then create out of nothing. Such an approach was totally unscientific, and the result could not possibly conform to reality.

On the contrary, an actual socialist society, like all previous forms of society, would only come into existence on the basis of what already existed before it; that is to say, it would be a society “just emerging from capitalist society, and which therefore in all respects – economic, moral and intellectual – still bears the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it sprung.”

In fact, it is the actual development within capitalist society which prepares the way for socialism, and indicates the character of the change. Production becomes increasingly social, in the sense that more and more people are associated in the making of every single thing; factories get larger and larger, and the process of production links together a very large number of people in the course of transforming raw materials into the finished article. There is greater and greater interdependence between people; the old feudal ties and connections have long been broken by capitalism, but in its development capitalism has built new connections of a far wider character – so wide that every individual becomes more or less dependent on what happens to society as a whole.

But although this is the steady tendency of capitalist production, the fact is that the product, made by the co-operative work of society, is the property of an individual or group and not the property of society. The first step in building up a socialist society must therefore be to give society the product which it has made; and this means that society as a whole must own the means of production – the factories, mines, machinery, ships, etc., which under capitalism are privately owned.

But this socialisation of the means of production itself takes place only on the basis of what the new society inherits from the old. And it is only the relatively large concerns which are so to speak ready to be taken over by society.

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