Chapter 5: Political Theory – Part III

Chapter 5: Political Theory: Theorists and Their Texts

PART III MODERN to 20th CENTURY

“Sexual ethics requires, still and always, that the individual conform to a certain art of living which defines the aesthetic and ethical criteria of existence.  But this art refers more and more to universal principles of nature or reason, which must observe in the same way, whatever their social status.”[1]  Foucault

Introduction

This final chapter on political theory is, like the two preceding ones, long, and for the same reason: it contains plenty of reading options.  The ideas are the authors’ not the readers.  It is important to understand what the reading is telling the reader.

This chapter offers historical readings that fall within traditional Western Political Thought courses’ in Political Science.  Inclusion of others’ voices is problematic in a project like this, because of lack of availability of free texts.  For example, the desired inclusion of authors like Flora Tristan (1803-1844) is not possible because their texts are not available for free use and the same applies to John Rawls (1921-2002).  While these and other limitations complicate the project, the chapter provides the reader with a means to navigate historical concepts.  Flora Tristan influenced several authors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels among them.  The Worker’s Union completed in 1842 predates the influential counterrevolutions in Europe of 1848 and The Communist Manifesto (1848) by six years.

Part III Modern to the 20th Century—This section starts with the Utilitarians, in the early 19th century, and progresses to the 20th century with the student manifesto titled The Port Huron Statement.  This chapter includes the pragmatic element of the good life, sensible public policy, and theoretical approaches that embody the reality of individuals.  For example, the connection among Marxism, capitalism, and industrialization define social and political life since the 19th century.  This section ends in the 20th century with the voices of students.

The early to mid-19th century connects economic development with effective and more inclusive attempts at governance.  The writings of John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx’s play a key role during this period.  Today their contributions to Utilitarianism and to Marxism must be studied not just as economic and political, but as social critiques of their respective historical periods.  The late 19th century presents Friedrich Nietzsche as a theorist that promoted ideas like the ‘anti-Christ.’  The polemic Nietzsche pushes theory to challenge truth as “a comfortable lie.”[2]  His writings promoted theories of existentialism and poststructuralism.  Nietzsche’s philosophy was later theorized and used by proponents of Germany’s Nazi regime.[3]

Emma Goldman, a supporter of anarchism at the turn of the 20th century, offers an alternative view of the social contract.  Her life experiences helped formulate her interpretation of the state; which challenges the writings of ancient theorists and of social contract theorists.  The high moral code and ethical standards formulated by anarchists and Goldman in this period promoted a view of the state as undesirable for the individual, because it does not allow for creativity, freedom, and human progress.  This theorist-activist pushed the limits of traditional political theory.  Goldman argued about the emancipation of individuals as human beings with potential for achievement and self-awareness.  Goldman asserted that the individual was the center of social and political emancipation.  Rosa Luxemburg modernizes Marx’s relationship with capital.  She promoted a more organic evolution of capital and the state than Lenin who believed in a strong party structure.  Challenging ideas of statehood via labor relations offered Luxemburg a position at the table to discuss economics and worker contributions to the advancement of society.  The imposed militarization of the workforce and expansion of capital along with the decay in the living conditions of workers were the inspiration, if you will, of Luxemburg’s argument.

Finally, the last text is about student activism.  Amid wars, both at home and abroad, the United States had to manage a philosophical challenge in governance.  The Port Huron Statement embodies the voices of students who traditionally feel voiceless and invisible.  In 1962, students in Michigan wrote a manifesto proclaiming expectations for a more just and democratic society.  Participatory democracy and high levels of civic engagement are voiced in the 21st century, but it is students of another generation that actualized these contentions.  This text offers an alternative view of pluralist and democratic society that continues to be the dream of many students today.

Table 1

What is the intent of the chapter?

The chapter uses original texts, and thus, offers students critical thinking skills in analysis, reading, and writing.  These historical authors are influential in the field of political theory.  The intent of the chapter is to demonstrate to students the evolution of political thought.

What are questions political theorists ask?  Why is it important?

Political theorists ask questions that are designed to develop conversations about political ideas.  In the world of political theorists’ values and ethics are important along with the idea of the good life, legitimate governance, and justice to name only a few.  Concepts of authority and authoritarian are examples of controversial issues that careful textual reading help unpack and further student understanding.

Questions to consider before starting the reading of the texts:

How do political theorists best read, learn, and discuss a text?  What is the art of this conversation?

Table 2

JOHN STUART MILL

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was born in London to a father who theorized and promoted utilitarianism and whose friends included Jeremy Bentham.  Mill learned ancient Greek and Latin at a very young age.  He worked for the East India Company for many years.  He suffered a mental crisis, and he was also physically sick.  He wrote a number of books and essays, an Autobiography, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and The Subjection of Women, to name a few.  Utilitarianism offered a pragmatic alternative between a scientific approach to politics and an ethical approach.  Moral issues mediated the scientific and the ethical approaches.  Romanticism and rationalism provided a path for Mill to seek a solution between them when it came to governance.  Utilitarianism allowed for pleasure and happiness with the intent of self-improvement as a goal.  However, Mill came to question how utilitarianism, rationalism, and classical liberalism could help individuals fulfill their goals of happiness and self-improvement.  Harriet Taylor became Mill’s wife upon her first husband’s death.  She was a thinker in her own right and influenced Mill in a number of ways.  He respected her position on women’s issues, like women’s suffrage.  Mill advocated for effective and efficient laws, rights of workers, rights of political prisoners, and the rights and improvement of colonized peoples.  What power should society and government have over individuals? This question was never fully answered by Mill.

On Utilitarianism[4]

CHAPTER II. WHAT UTILITARIANISM IS.

A passing remark is all that needs be given to the ignorant blunder of supposing that those who stand up for utility as the test of right and wrong, use the term in that restricted and merely colloquial sense in which utility is opposed to pleasure. An apology is due to the philosophical opponents of utilitarianism, for even the momentary appearance of confounding them with any one capable of so absurd a misconception; which is the more extraordinary, inasmuch as the contrary accusation, of referring everything to pleasure, and that too in its grossest form, is another of the common charges against utilitarianism: and, as has been pointedly remarked by an able writer, the same sort of persons, and often the very same persons, denounce the theory “as impracticably dry when the word utility precedes the word pleasure, and as too practicably voluptuous when the word pleasure precedes the word utility.” Those who know anything about the matter are aware that every writer, from Epicurus to Bentham, who maintained the theory of utility, meant by it, not something to be contradistinguished from pleasure, but pleasure itself, together with exemption from pain; and instead of opposing the useful to the agreeable or the ornamental, have always declared that the useful means these, among other things. Yet the common herd, including the herd of writers, not only in newspapers and periodicals, but in books of weight and pretension, are perpetually falling into this shallow mistake. Having caught up the word utilitarian, while knowing nothing whatever about it but its sound, they habitually express by it the rejection, or the neglect, of pleasure in some of its forms; of beauty, of ornament, or of amusement. Nor is the term thus ignorantly misapplied solely in disparagement, but occasionally in compliment; as though it implied superiority to frivolity and the mere pleasures of the moment. And this perverted use is the only one in which the word is popularly known, and the one from which the new generation are acquiring their sole notion of its meaning. Those who introduced the word, but who had for many years discontinued it as a distinctive appellation, may well feel themselves called upon to resume it, if by doing so they can hope to contribute anything towards rescuing it from this utter degradation.

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded—namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.

Now, such a theory of life excites in many minds, and among them in some of the most estimable in feeling and purpose, inveterate dislike. To suppose that life has (as they express it) no higher end than pleasure—no better and nobler object of desire and pursuit—they designate as utterly mean and groveling; as a doctrine worthy only of swine, to whom the followers of Epicurus were, at a very early period, contemptuously likened; and modern holders of the doctrine are occasionally made the subject of equally polite comparisons by its German, French, and English assailants.

When thus attacked, the Epicureans have always answered, that it is not they, but their accusers, who represent human nature in a degrading light; since the accusation supposes human beings to be capable of no pleasures except those of which swine are capable. If this supposition were true, the charge could not be gainsaid, but would then be no longer an imputation; for if the sources of pleasure were precisely the same to human beings and to swine, the rule of life which is good enough for the one would be good enough for the other. The comparison of the Epicurean life to that of beasts is felt as degrading, precisely because a beast’s pleasures do not satisfy a human being’s conceptions of happiness. Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification. I do not, indeed, consider the Epicureans to have been by any means faultless in drawing out their scheme of consequences from the utilitarian principle.

To do this in any sufficient manner, many Stoic, as well as Christian elements require to be included. But there is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect; of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation. It must be admitted, however, that utilitarian writers in general have placed the superiority of mental over bodily pleasures chiefly in the greater permanency, safety, uncostliness, &c., of the former—that is, in their circumstantial advantages rather than in their intrinsic nature. And on all these points utilitarians have fully proved their case; but they might have taken the other, and, as it may be called, higher ground, with entire consistency. It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognise the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. It would be absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone.

If I am asked, what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure. If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account.

Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties. Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. They would not resign what they possess more than he, for the most complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have in common with him. If they ever fancy they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme, that to escape from it they would exchange their lot for almost any other, however undesirable in their own eyes. A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and is certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable; we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, an appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power, or to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it: but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them. Whoever supposes that this preference takes place at a sacrifice of happiness-that the superior being, in anything like equal circumstances, is not happier than the inferior-confounds the two very different ideas, of happiness, and content. It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly-endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

It may be objected, that many who are capable of the higher pleasures, occasionally, under the influence of temptation, postpone them to the lower. But this is quite compatible with a full appreciation of the intrinsic superiority of the higher. Men often, from infirmity of character, make their election for the nearer good, though they know it to be the less valuable; and this no less when the choice is between two bodily pleasures, than when it is between bodily and mental. They pursue sensual indulgences to the injury of health, though perfectly aware that health is the greater good. It may be further objected, that many who begin with youthful enthusiasm for everything noble, as they advance in years sink into indolence and selfishness. But I do not believe that those who undergo this very common change, voluntarily choose the lower description of pleasures in preference to the higher. I believe that before they devote themselves exclusively to the one, they have already become incapable of the other. Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying. It may be questioned whether any one who has remained equally susceptible to both classes of pleasures, ever knowingly and calmly preferred the lower; though many, in all ages, have broken down in an ineffectual attempt to combine both.

From this verdict of the only competent judges, I apprehend there can be no appeal. On a question which is the best worth having of two pleasures, or which of two modes of existence is the most grateful to the feelings, apart from its moral attributes and from its consequences, the judgment of those who are qualified by knowledge of both, or, if they differ, that of the majority among them, must be admitted as final. And there needs be the less hesitation to accept this judgment respecting the quality of pleasures, since there is no other tribunal to be referred to even on the question of quantity. What means are there of determining which is the acutest of two pains, or the intensest of two pleasurable sensations, except the general suffrage of those who are familiar with both? Neither pains nor pleasures are homogeneous, and pain is always heterogeneous with pleasure. What is there to decide whether a particular pleasure is worth purchasing at the cost of a particular pain, except the feelings and judgment of the experienced? When, therefore, those feelings and judgment declare the pleasures derived from the higher faculties to be preferable in kind, apart from the question of intensity, to those of which the animal nature, disjoined from the higher faculties, is susceptible, they are entitled on this subject to the same regard.

I have dwelt on this point, as being a necessary part of a perfectly just conception of Utility or Happiness, considered as the directive rule of human conduct. But it is by no means an indispensable condition to the acceptance of the utilitarian standard; for that standard is not the agent’s own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether; and if it may possibly be doubted whether a noble character is always the happier for its nobleness, there can be no doubt that it makes other people happier, and that the world in general is immensely a gainer by it. Utilitarianism, therefore, could only attain its end by the general cultivation of nobleness of character, even if each individual were only benefited by the nobleness of others, and his own, so far as happiness is concerned, were a sheer deduction from the benefit. But the bare enunciation of such an absurdity as this last, renders refutation superfluous.

According to the Greatest Happiness Principle, as above explained, the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desirable (whether we are considering our own good or that of other people), is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and quality; the test of quality, and the rule for measuring it against quantity, being the preference felt by those who, in their opportunities of experience, to which must be added their habits of self-consciousness and self-observation, are best furnished with the means of comparison. This, being, according to the utilitarian opinion, the end of human action, is necessarily also the standard of morality; which may accordingly be defined, the rules and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of which an existence such as has been described might be, to the greatest extent possible, secured to all mankind; and not to them only, but, so far as the nature of things admits, to the whole sentient creation.

Against this doctrine, however, arises another class of objectors, who say that happiness, in any form, cannot be the rational purpose of human life and action; because, in the first place, it is unattainable: and they contemptuously ask, What right hast thou to be happy? a question which Mr. Carlyle clenches by the addition, What right, a short time ago, hadst thou even to be? Next, they say, that men can do without happiness; that all noble human beings have felt this, and could not have become noble but by learning the lesson of Entsagen, or renunciation; which lesson, thoroughly learnt and submitted to, they affirm to be the beginning and necessary condition of all virtue.

The first of these objections would go to the root of the matter were it well founded; for if no happiness is to be had at all by human beings, the attainment of it cannot be the end of morality, or of any rational conduct. Though, even in that case, something might still be said for the utilitarian theory; since utility includes not solely the pursuit of happiness, but the prevention or mitigation of unhappiness; and if the former aim be chimerical, there will be all the greater scope and more imperative need for the latter, so long at least as mankind think fit to live, and do not take refuge in the simultaneous act of suicide recommended under certain conditions by Novalis. When, however, it is thus positively asserted to be impossible that human life should be happy, the assertion, if not something like a verbal quibble, is at least an exaggeration. If by happiness be meant a continuity of highly pleasurable excitement, it is evident enough that this is impossible. A state of exalted pleasure lasts only moments, or in some cases, and with some intermissions, hours or days, and is the occasional brilliant flash of enjoyment, not its permanent and steady flame. Of this the philosophers who have taught that happiness is the end of life were as fully aware as those who taunt them. The happiness which they meant was not a life of rapture, but moments of such, in an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive, and having as the foundation of the whole, not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing. A life thus composed, to those who have been fortunate enough to obtain it, has always appeared worthy of the name of happiness. And such an existence is even now the lot of many, during some considerable portion of their lives. The present wretched education, and wretched social arrangements, are the only real hindrance to its being attainable by almost all.

The objectors perhaps may doubt whether human beings, if taught to consider happiness as the end of life, would be satisfied with such a moderate share of it. But great numbers of mankind have been satisfied with much less. The main constituents of a satisfied life appear to be two, either of which by itself is often found sufficient for the purpose: tranquility, and excitement. With much tranquility, many find that they can be content with very little pleasure: with much excitement, many can reconcile themselves to a considerable quantity of pain. There is assuredly no inherent impossibility in enabling even the mass of mankind to unite both; since the two are so far from being incompatible that they are in natural alliance, the prolongation of either being a preparation for, and exciting a wish for, the other. It is only those in whom indolence amounts to a vice, that do not desire excitement after an interval of repose; it is only those in whom the need of excitement is a disease, that feel the tranquility which follows excitement dull and insipid, instead of pleasurable in direct proportion to the excitement which preceded it. When people who are tolerably fortunate in their outward lot do not find in life sufficient enjoyment to make it valuable to them, the cause generally is, caring for nobody but themselves. To those who have neither public nor private affections, the excitements of life are much curtailed, and in any case dwindle in value as the time approaches when all selfish interests must be terminated by death: while those who leave after them objects of personal affection, and especially those who have also cultivated a fellow-feeling with the collective interests of mankind, retain as lively an interest in life on the eve of death as in the vigour of youth and health. Next to selfishness, the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory, is want of mental cultivation. A cultivated mind—I do not mean that of a philosopher, but any mind to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties—finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it; in the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind past and present, and their prospects in the future. It is possible, indeed, to become indifferent to all this, and that too without having exhausted a thousandth part of it; but only when one has had from the beginning no moral or human interest in these things, and has sought in them only the gratification of curiosity.

Now there is absolutely no reason in the nature of things why an amount of mental culture sufficient to give an intelligent interest in these objects of contemplation, should not be the inheritance of every one born in a civilized country. As little is there an inherent necessity that any human being should be a selfish egotist, devoid of every feeling or care but those which center in his own miserable individuality. Something far superior to this is sufficiently common even now, to give ample earnest of what the human species may be made. Genuine private affections, and a sincere interest in the public good, are possible, though in unequal degrees, to every rightly brought-up human being. In a world in which there is so much to interest, so much to enjoy, and so much also to correct and improve, every one who has this moderate amount of moral and intellectual requisites is capable of an existence which may be called enviable; and unless such a person, through bad laws, or subjection to the will of others, is denied the liberty to use the sources of happiness within his reach, he will not fail to find this enviable existence, if he escape the positive evils of life, the great sources of physical and mental suffering—such as indigence, disease, and the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature loss of objects of affection. The main stress of the problem lies, therefore, in the contest with these calamities, from which it is a rare good fortune entirely to escape; which, as things now are, cannot be obviated, and often cannot be in any material degree mitigated. Yet no one whose opinion deserves a moment’s consideration can doubt that most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits.

Poverty, in any sense implying suffering, may be completely extinguished by the wisdom of society, combined with the good sense and providence of individuals. Even that most intractable of enemies, disease, may be indefinitely reduced in dimensions by good physical and moral education, and proper control of noxious influences; while the progress of science holds out a promise for the future of still more direct conquests over this detestable foe. And every advance in that direction relieves us from some, not only of the chances which cut short our own lives, but, what concerns us still more, which deprive us of those in whom our happiness is wrapt up. As for vicissitudes of fortune, and other disappointments connected with worldly circumstances, these are principally the effect either of gross imprudence, of ill-regulated desires, or of bad or imperfect social institutions. All the grand sources, in short, of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely, conquerable by human care and effort; and though their removal is grievously slow—though a long succession of generations will perish in the breach before the conquest is completed, and this world becomes all that, if will and knowledge were not wanting, it might easily be made—yet every mind sufficiently intelligent and generous to bear a part, however small and inconspicuous, in the endeavour, will draw a noble enjoyment from the contest itself, which he would not for any bribe in the form of selfish indulgence consent to be without.

And this leads to the true estimation of what is said by the objectors concerning the possibility, and the obligation, of learning to do without happiness. Unquestionably it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind, even in those parts of our present world which are least deep in barbarism; and it often has to be done voluntarily by the hero or the martyr, for the sake of something which he prizes more than his individual happiness. But this something, what is it, unless the happiness of others, or some of the requisites of happiness? It is noble to be capable of resigning entirely one’s own portion of happiness, or chances of it: but, after all, this self-sacrifice must be for some end; it is not its own end; and if we are told that its end is not happiness, but virtue, which is better than happiness, I ask, would the sacrifice be made if the hero or martyr did not believe that it would earn for others immunity from similar sacrifices? Would it be made, if he thought that his renunciation of happiness for himself would produce no fruit for any of his fellow creatures, but to make their lot like his, and place them also in the condition of persons who have renounced happiness? All honour to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life, when by such renunciation they contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world; but he who does it, or professes to do it, for any other purpose, is no more deserving of admiration than the ascetic mounted on his pillar. He may be an inspiriting proof of what men can do, but assuredly not an example of what they should.

Though it is only in a very imperfect state of the world’s arrangements that any one can best serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own, yet so long as the world is in that imperfect state, I fully acknowledge that the readiness to make such a sacrifice is the highest virtue which can be found in man. I will add, that in this condition of the world, paradoxical as the assertion may be, the conscious ability to do without happiness gives the best prospect of realizing such happiness as is attainable. For nothing except that consciousness can raise a person above the chances of life, by making him feel that, let fate and fortune do their worst, they have not power to subdue him: which, once felt, frees him from excess of anxiety concerning the evils of life, and enables him, like many a Stoic in the worst times of the Roman Empire, to cultivate in tranquility the sources of satisfaction accessible to him, without concerning himself about the uncertainty of their duration, any more than about their inevitable end.

Meanwhile, let utilitarians never cease to claim the morality of self-devotion as a possession which belongs by as good a right to them, as either to the Stoic or to the Transcendentalist. The utilitarian morality does recognize in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted. The only self-renunciation which it applauds, is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of happiness, of others; either of mankind collectively, or of individuals within the limits imposed by the collective interests of mankind.

I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent’s own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. As the means of making the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness, or (as speaking practically it may be called) the interest, of every individual, as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole; and secondly, that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole; especially between his own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes: so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being’s sentient existence. If the impugners of the utilitarian morality represented it to their own minds in this its true character, I know not what recommendation possessed by any other morality they could possibly affirm to be wanting to it: what more beautiful or more exalted developments of human nature any other ethical system can be supposed to foster, or what springs of action, not accessible to the utilitarian, such systems rely on for giving effect to their mandates.

The objectors to utilitarianism cannot always be charged with representing it in a discreditable light. On the contrary, those among them who entertain anything like a just idea of its disinterested character, sometimes find fault with its standard as being too high for humanity. They say it is exacting too much to require that people shall always act from the inducement of promoting the general interests of society. But this is to mistake the very meaning of a standard of morals, and to confound the rule of action with the motive of it. It is the business of ethics to tell us what are our duties, or by what test we may know them; but no system of ethics requires that the sole motive of all we do shall be a feeling of duty; on the contrary, ninety-nine hundredths of all our actions are done from other motives, and rightly so done, if the rule of duty does not condemn them. It is the more unjust to utilitarianism that this particular misapprehension should be made a ground of objection to it, inasmuch as utilitarian moralists have gone beyond almost all others in affirming that the motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action, though much with the worth of the agent. He who saves a fellow creature from drowning does what is morally right, whether his motive be duty, or the hope of being paid for his trouble: he who betrays the friend that trusts him, is guilty of a crime, even if his object be to serve another friend to whom he is under greater obligations. But to speak only of actions done from the motive of duty, and in direct obedience to principle: it is a misapprehension of the utilitarian mode of thought, to conceive it as implying that people should fix their minds upon so wide a generality as the world, or society at large. The great majority of good actions are intended, not for the benefit of the world, but for that of individuals, of which the good of the world is made up; and the thoughts of the most virtuous man need not on these occasions travel beyond the particular persons concerned, except so far as is necessary to assure himself that in benefiting them he is not violating the rights—that is, the legitimate and authorized expectations—of any one else. The multiplication of happiness is, according to the utilitarian ethics, the object of virtue: the occasions on which any person (except one in a thousand) has it in his power to do this on an extended scale, in other words, to be a public benefactor, are but exceptional; and on these occasions alone is he called on to consider public utility; in every other case, private utility, the interest or happiness of some few persons, is all he has to attend to. Those alone the influence of whose actions extends to society in general, need concern themselves habitually about so large an object. In the case of abstinences indeed—of things which people forbear to do, from moral considerations, though the consequences in the particular case might be beneficial—it would be unworthy of an intelligent agent not to be consciously aware that the action is of a class which, if practiced generally, would be generally injurious, and that this is the ground of the obligation to abstain from it. The amount of regard for the public interest implied in this recognition, is no greater than is demanded by every system of morals; for they all enjoin to abstain from whatever is manifestly pernicious to society.

The same considerations dispose of another reproach against the doctrine of utility, founded on a still grosser misconception of the purpose of a standard of morality, and of the very meaning of the words right and wrong. It is often affirmed that utilitarianism renders men cold and unsympathizing; that it chills their moral feelings towards individuals; that it makes them regard only the dry and hard consideration of the consequences of actions, not taking into their moral estimate the qualities from which those actions emanate. If the assertion means that they do not allow their judgment respecting the rightness or wrongness of an action to be influenced by their opinion of the qualities of the person who does it, this is a complaint not against utilitarianism, but against having any standard of morality at all; for certainly no known ethical standard decides an action to be good or bad because it is done by a good or a bad man, still less because done by an amiable, a brave, or a benevolent man or the contrary. These considerations are relevant, not to the estimation of actions, but of persons; and there is nothing in the utilitarian theory inconsistent with the fact that there are other things which interest us in persons besides the rightness and wrongness of their actions. The Stoics, indeed, with the paradoxical misuse of language which was part of their system, and by which they strove to raise themselves above all concern about anything but virtue, were fond of saying that he who has that has everything; that he, and only he, is rich, is beautiful, is a king. But no claim of this description is made for the virtuous man by the utilitarian doctrine. Utilitarians are quite aware that there are other desirable possessions and qualities besides virtue, and are perfectly willing to allow to all of them their full worth. They are also aware that a right action does not necessarily indicate a virtuous character, and that actions which are blamable often proceed from qualities entitled to praise. When this is apparent in any particular case, it modifies their estimation, not certainly of the act, but of the agent. I grant that they are, notwithstanding, of opinion, that in the long run the best proof of a good character is good actions; and resolutely refuse to consider any mental disposition as good, of which the predominant tendency is to produce bad conduct. This makes them unpopular with many people; but it is an unpopularity which they must share with every one who regards the distinction between right and wrong in a serious light; and the reproach is not one which a conscientious utilitarian need be anxious to repel.

If no more be meant by the objection than that many utilitarians look on the morality of actions, as measured by the utilitarian standard, with too exclusive a regard, and do not lay sufficient stress upon the other beauties of character which go towards making a human being loveable or admirable, this may be admitted. Utilitarians who have cultivated their moral feelings, but not their sympathies nor their artistic perceptions, do fall into this mistake; and so do all other moralists under the same conditions. What can be said in excuse for other moralists is equally available for them, namely, that if there is to be any error, it is better that it should be on that side. As a matter of fact, we may affirm that among utilitarians as among adherents of other systems, there is every imaginable degree of rigidity and of laxity in the application of their standard: some are even puritanically rigorous, while others are as indulgent as can possibly be desired by sinner or by sentimentalist. But on the whole, a doctrine which brings prominently forward the interest that mankind have in the repression and prevention of conduct which violates the moral law, is likely to be inferior to no other in turning the sanctions of opinion against such violations. It is true, the question, What does violate the moral law? is one on which those who recognise different standards of morality are likely now and then to differ. But difference of opinion on moral questions was not first introduced into the world by utilitarianism, while that doctrine does supply, if not always an easy, at all events a tangible and intelligible mode of deciding such differences.

It may not be superfluous to notice a few more of the common misapprehensions of utilitarian ethics, even those which are so obvious and gross that it might appear impossible for any person of candour and intelligence to fall into them: since persons, even of considerable mental endowments, often give themselves so little trouble to understand the bearings of any opinion against which they entertain a prejudice, and men are in general so little conscious of this voluntary ignorance as a defect, that the vulgarest misunderstandings of ethical doctrines are continually met with in the deliberate writings of persons of the greatest pretensions both to high principle and to philosophy. We not uncommonly hear the doctrine of utility inveighed against as a godless doctrine. If it be necessary to say anything at all against so mere an assumption, we may say that the question depends upon what idea we have formed of the moral character of the Deity. If it be a true belief that God desires, above all things, the happiness of his creatures, and that this was his purpose in their creation, utility is not only not a godless doctrine, but more profoundly religious than any other. If it be meant that utilitarianism does not recognize the revealed will of God as the supreme law of morals, I answer, that an utilitarian who believes in the perfect goodness and wisdom of God, necessarily believes that whatever God has thought fit to reveal on the subject of morals, must fulfill the requirements of utility in a supreme degree. But others besides utilitarians have been of opinion that the Christian revelation was intended, and is fitted, to inform the hearts and minds of mankind with a spirit which should enable them to find for themselves what is right, and incline them to do it when found, rather than to tell them, except in a very general way, what it is: and that we need a doctrine of ethics, carefully followed out, to interpret to us the will of God. Whether this opinion is correct or not, it is superfluous here to discuss; since whatever aid religion, either natural or revealed, can afford to ethical investigation, is as open to the utilitarian moralist as to any other. He can use it as the testimony of God to the usefulness or hurtfulness of any given course of action, by as good a right as others can use it for the indication of a transcendental law, having no connection with usefulness or with happiness.

Again, Utility is often summarily stigmatized as an immoral doctrine by giving it the name of Expediency, and taking advantage of the popular use of that term to contrast it with Principle. But the Expedient, in the sense in which it is opposed to the Right, generally means that which is expedient for the particular interest of the agent himself: as when a minister sacrifices the interest of his country to keep himself in place. When it means anything better than this, it means that which is expedient for some immediate object, some temporary purpose, but which violates a rule whose observance is expedient in a much higher degree. The Expedient, in this sense, instead of being the same thing with the useful, is a branch of the hurtful. Thus, it would often be expedient, for the purpose of getting over some momentary embarrassment, or attaining some object immediately useful to ourselves or others, to tell a lie. But inasmuch as the cultivation in ourselves of a sensitive feeling on the subject of veracity, is one of the most useful, and the enfeeblement of that feeling one of the most hurtful, things to which our conduct can be instrumental; and inasmuch as any, even unintentional, deviation from truth, does that much towards weakening the trustworthiness of human assertion, which is not only the principal support of all present social well-being, but the insufficiency of which does more than any one thing that can be named to keep back civilization, virtue, everything on which human happiness on the largest scale depends; we feel that the violation, for a present advantage, of a rule of such transcendent expediency, is not expedient, and that he who, for the sake of a convenience to himself or to some other individual, does what depends on him to deprive mankind of the good, and inflict upon them the evil, involved in the greater or less reliance which they can place in each other’s word, acts the part of one of their worst enemies. Yet that even this rule, sacred as it is, admits of possible exceptions, is acknowledged by all moralists; the chief of which is when the withholding of some fact (as of information from a male-factor, or of bad news from a person dangerously ill) would preserve some one (especially a person other than oneself) from great and unmerited evil, and when the withholding can only be effected by denial. But in order that the exception may not extend itself beyond the need, and may have the least possible effect in weakening reliance on veracity, it ought to be recognized, and, if possible, its limits defined; and if the principle of utility is good for anything, it must be good for weighing these conflicting utilities against one another, and marking out the region within which one or the other preponderates.

Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to reply to such objections as this—that there is not time, previous to action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity, because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments. The answer to the objection is, that there has been ample time, namely, the whole past duration of the human species. During all that time mankind have been learning by experience the tendencies of actions; on which experience all the prudence, as well as all the morality of life, is dependent. People talk as if the commencement of this course of experience had hitherto been put off, and as if, at the moment when some man feels tempted to meddle with the property or life of another, he had to begin considering for the first time whether murder and theft are injurious to human happiness. Even then I do not think that he would find the question very puzzling; but, at all events, the matter is now done to his hand. It is truly a whimsical supposition, that if mankind were agreed in considering utility to be the test of morality, they would remain without any agreement as to what is useful, and would take no measures for having their notions on the subject taught to the young, and enforced by law and opinion. There is no difficulty in proving any ethical standard whatever to work ill, if we suppose universal idiocy to be conjoined with it, but on any hypothesis short of that, mankind must by this time have acquired positive beliefs as to the effects of some actions on their happiness; and the beliefs which have thus come down are the rules of morality for the multitude, and for the philosopher until he has succeeded in finding better. That philosophers might easily do this, even now, on many subjects; that the received code of ethics is by no means of divine right; and that mankind have still much to learn as to the effects of actions on the general happiness, I admit, or rather, earnestly maintain. The corollaries from the principle of utility, like the precepts of every practical art, admit of indefinite improvement, and, in a progressive state of the human mind, their improvement is perpetually going on.

But to consider the rules of morality as improvable, is one thing; to pass over the intermediate generalizations entirely, and endeavour to test each individual action directly by the first principle, is another. It is a strange notion that the acknowledgment of a first principle is inconsistent with the admission of secondary ones. To inform a traveller respecting the place of his ultimate destination, is not to forbid the use of landmarks and direction-posts on the way. The proposition that happiness is the end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid down to that goal, or that persons going thither should not be advised to take one direction rather than another. Men really ought to leave off talking a kind of nonsense on this subject, which they would neither talk nor listen to on other matters of practical concernment. Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded on astronomy, because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical Almanack. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready calculated; and all rational creatures go out upon the sea of life with their minds made up on the common questions of right and wrong, as well as on many of the far more difficult questions of wise and foolish. And this, as long as foresight is a human quality, it is to be presumed they will continue to do. Whatever we adopt as the fundamental principle of morality, we require subordinate principles to apply it by: the impossibility of doing without them, being common to all systems, can afford no argument against any one in particular: but gravely to argue as if no such secondary principles could be had, and as if mankind had remained till now, and always must remain, without drawing any general conclusions from the experience of human life, is as high a pitch, I think, as absurdity has ever reached in philosophical controversy.

The remainder of the stock arguments against utilitarianism mostly consist in laying to its charge the common infirmities of human nature, and the general difficulties which embarrass conscientious persons in shaping their course through life. We are told that an utilitarian will be apt to make his own particular case an exception to moral rules, and, when under temptation, will see an utility in the breach of a rule, greater than he will see in its observance. But is utility the only creed which is able to furnish us with excuses for evil doing, and means of cheating our own conscience?

They are afforded in abundance by all doctrines which recognize as a fact in morals the existence of conflicting considerations; which all doctrines do, that have been believed by sane persons. It is not the fault of any creed, but of the complicated nature of human affairs, that rules of conduct cannot be so framed as to require no exceptions, and that hardly any kind of action can safely be laid down as either always obligatory or always condemnable. There is no ethical creed which does not temper the rigidity of its laws, by giving a certain latitude, under the moral responsibility of the agent, for accommodation to peculiarities of circumstances; and under every creed, at the opening thus made, self-deception and dishonest casuistry get in. There exists no moral system under which there do not arise unequivocal cases of conflicting obligation. These are the real difficulties, the knotty points both in the theory of ethics, and in the conscientious guidance of personal conduct. They are overcome practically with greater or with less success according to the intellect and virtue of the individual; but it can hardly be pretended that any one will be the less qualified for dealing with them, from possessing an ultimate standard to which conflicting rights and duties can be referred. If utility is the ultimate source of moral obligations, utility may be invoked to decide between them when their demands are incompatible. Though the application of the standard may be difficult, it is better than none at all: while in other systems, the moral laws all claiming independent authority, there is no common umpire entitled to interfere between them; their claims to precedence one over another rest on little better than sophistry, and unless determined, as they generally are, by the unacknowledged influence of considerations of utility, afford a free scope for the action of personal desires and partialities. We must remember that only in these cases of conflict between secondary principles is it requisite that first principles should be appealed to. There is no case of moral obligation in which some secondary principle is not involved; and if only one, there can seldom be any real doubt which one it is, in the mind of any person by whom the principle itself is recognized.

KARL MARX

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was born in Prussia (today Germany) to a Jewish family who converted to the Lutheran faith in order to find political protections and for his father to be able to practice law.  Marx studied Hegelian philosophy, and history at the University of Bonn.  He moved a lot in Europe due to his ideas and philosophical positions on social and economic issues.  He lived in Belgium, Paris, and London.  Marx knew about how to be on the move!  He had seven children with his sweetheart.  He was a devoted father and husband.  However, four of his children died very young and his three living daughters, even after marriage, had a good relationship with Marx.  He made a living largely as a journalist and as a social critic.  His social positions challenged the economic development during a time of rapid industrialization and increased capital accumulation.  Perhaps, one ought to consider reading Marx not as an economist but rather as a social critic of the working conditions of individuals and of capitalists who owned the means of production (the factories and the coal mines).  His “journalistic” approach to the counterrevolutions in Europe of 1848 produced a somewhat humorous text The Eighteenth Brumaire, a discussion about Louis Napoleon III.  He wrote prolifically, and among his writings, one finds the following texts: Das Kapital, German Ideology, 1844 Manuscripts, and Manifesto of the Communist Party.  Some might recognize the name of many of these works. What worried Marx?  Marx was concerned with war, rapid industrialization, working conditions, poverty, modes of production, the relationship between the proletariat (laborers) and the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production), and trade to name only few.  He made contributions to theory by using and critiquing Hegel’s dialectical method, introducing surplus value to theory, alienation and estrangement, and historical materialism.  Marx did not ‘invent’ communism or socialism.  Before Marx was born, communities in Europe were promoting and living these ideals.  Marx took to task some of his predecessors like St. Simon and Fourier and labeled this form of socialism as utopian socialism and his theory as scientific socialism.

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844[5]

Estranged Labour

||XXII| We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labor, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land – likewise division of labor, competition, the concept of exchange value, etc. On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – property owners and propertyless workers.

Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws – i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. Political economy throws no light on the cause of the division between labor and capital, and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause, i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain. Similarly, competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from external circumstances. As to how far these external and apparently accidental circumstances are but the expression of a necessary course of development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen how exchange itself appears to it as an accidental fact. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are greed, and the war amongst the greedy – competition.

Precisely because political economy does not grasp the way the movement is connected, it was possible to oppose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to the doctrine of the guild, the doctrine of the division of landed property to the doctrine of the big estate – for competition, freedom of the crafts and the division of landed property were explained and comprehended only as accidental, premeditated and violent consequences of monopoly, of the guild system, and of feudal property, not as their necessary, inevitable and natural consequences.

Now, therefore, we have to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, greed, the separation of labor, capital and landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc. – the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system.

Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition explains nothing; it merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance. The economist assumes in the form of a fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce – namely, the necessary relationship between two things – between, for example, division of labor and exchange. Thus the theologian explains the origin of evil by the fall of Man – that is, he assumes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained.

We proceed from an actual economic fact.

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.

This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

So much does the labor’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labor itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital.

All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

||XXIII/ Let us now look more closely at the objectification, at the production of the worker; and in it at the estrangement, the loss of the object, of his product.

The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labor is realized, in which it is active, from which, and by means of which it produces.

But just as nature provides labor with [the] means of life in the sense that labor cannot live without objects on which to operate, on the other hand, it also provides the means of life in the more restricted sense, i.e., the means for the physical subsistence of the worker himself.

Thus the more the worker by his labor appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in two respects: first, in that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labor – to be his labor’s means of life; and, second, in that it more and more ceases to be a means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker.

In both respects, therefore, the worker becomes a servant of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labor, i.e., in that he receives work, and, secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. This enables him to exist, first as a worker; and second, as a physical subject. The height of this servitude is that it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.

(According to the economic laws the estrangement of the worker in his object is expressed thus: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the more powerful labor becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labor becomes, the less ingenious becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature’s slave.)

Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labor by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labor) and production. It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things – but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces – but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty – but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back into barbarous types of labor and it turns the other section into a machine. It produces intelligence – but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism.

The direct relationship of labor to its products is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production. The relationship of the man of means to the objects of production and to production itself is only a consequence of this first relationship – and confirms it. We shall consider this other aspect later. When we ask, then, what is the essential relationship of labor we are asking about the relationship of the worker to production.

Till now we have been considering the estrangement, the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects, i.e., the worker’s relationship to the products of his labor. But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production, within the producing activity, itself. How could the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activity, of production. If then the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labor is merely summarized the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labor itself.

What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another.

Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.

Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions.

We have considered the act of estranging practical human activity, labor, in two of its aspects. (1) The relation of the worker to the product of labor as an alien object exercising power over him. This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature, as an alien world inimically opposed to him. (2) The relation of labor to the act of production within the labor process. This relation is the relation of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker’s own physical and mental energy, his personal life – for what is life but activity? – as an activity which is turned against him, independent of him and not belonging to him. Here we have self-estrangement, as previously we had the estrangement of the thing.

||XXIV| We have still a third aspect of estranged labor to deduce from the two already considered.

Man is a species being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species (his own as well as those of other things) as his object, but – and this is only another way of expressing it – also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being.

The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on organic nature; and the more universal man (or the animal) is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art – his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible – so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body.

Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.

For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.

The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being. Or it is only because he is a species being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labor reverses the relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.

In creating a world of objects by his personal activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as his own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty.

It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species being. This production is his active species life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.

Similarly, in degrading spontaneous, free activity to a means, estranged labor makes man’s species life a means to his physical existence.

The consciousness which man has of his species is thus transformed by estrangement in such a way that species life becomes for him a means.

Estranged labor turns thus:

(3) Man’s species being, both nature and his spiritual species property, into a being alien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect.

(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.

In fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.

The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man [stands] to himself, is realized and expressed only in the relationship in which a man stands to other men.

Hence within the relationship of estranged labor each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the relationship in which he finds himself as a worker.

||XXV| We took our departure from a fact of political economy – the estrangement of the worker and his production. We have formulated this fact in conceptual terms as estranged, alienated labor. We have analyzed this concept – hence analyzing merely a fact of political economy.

Let us now see, further, how the concept of estranged, alienated labor must express and present itself in real life.

If the product of labor is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong?

To a being other than myself.

Who is this being?

The gods? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal production (for example, the building of temples, etc., in Egypt, India and Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to the gods. However, the gods on their own were never the lords of labor. No more was nature. And what a contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labor and the more the miracles of the gods were rendered superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more man were to renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment of the product to please these powers.

The alien being, to whom labor and the product of labor belongs, in whose service labor is done and for whose benefit the product of labor is provided, can only be man himself.

If the product of labor does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must give satisfaction and pleasure. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.

We must bear in mind the previous proposition that man’s relation to himself becomes for him objective and actual through his relation to the other man. Thus, if the product of his labor, his labor objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him. If he treats his own activity as an unfree activity, then he treats it as an activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion, and the yoke of another man.

Every self-estrangement of man, from himself and from nature, appears in the relation in which he places himself and nature to men other than and differentiated from himself. For this reason religious self-estrangement necessarily appears in the relationship of the layman to the priest, or again to a mediator, etc., since we are here dealing with the intellectual world. In the real practical world self-estrangement can only become manifest through the real practical relationship to other men. The medium through which estrangement takes place is itself practical. Thus through estranged labor man not only creates his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to powers [in the manuscript Menschen (men) instead of Mächte (powers). – Ed.] that are alien and hostile to him; he also creates the relationship in which other men stand to his production and to his product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. Just as he creates his own production as the loss of his reality, as his punishment; his own product as a loss, as a product not belonging to him; so he creates the domination of the person who does not produce over production and over the product. Just as he estranges his own activity from himself, so he confers upon the stranger an activity which is not his own.

We have until now considered this relationship only from the standpoint of the worker and later on we shall be considering it also from the standpoint of the non-worker.

Through estranged, alienated labor, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labor of a man alien to labor and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labor creates the relation to it of the capitalist (or whatever one chooses to call the master of labor). Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.

Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labor, i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labor, of estranged life, of estranged man.

True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labor (of alienated life) in political economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labor, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.

Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, appear again, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labor, and that on the other it is the means by which labor alienates itself, the realization of this alienation.

This exposition immediately sheds light on various hitherto unsolved conflicts.

(1) Political economy starts from labor as the real soul of production; yet to labor it gives nothing, and to private property everything. Confronting this contradiction, Proudhon has decided in favor of labor against private property. We understand, however, that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction of estranged labor with itself, and that political economy has merely formulated the laws of estranged labor.

We also understand, therefore, that wages and private property are identical. Indeed, where the product, as the object of labor, pays for labor itself, there the wage is but a necessary consequence of labor’s estrangement. Likewise, in the wage of labor, labor does not appear as an end in itself but as the servant of the wage. We shall develop this point later, and meanwhile will only draw some conclusions. ||XXVI|

An enforced increase of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that such an increase, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not win either for the worker or for labor their human status and dignity.

Indeed, even the equality of wages, as demanded by Proudhon, only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labor into the relationship of all men to labor. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist.

Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other.

(2) From the relationship of estranged labor to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation.

Just as we have derived the concept of private property from the concept of estranged, alienated labor by analysis, so we can develop every category of political economy with the help of these two factors; and we shall find again in each category, e.g., trade, competition, capital, money only a particular and developed expression of these first elements.

But before considering this phenomenon, however, let us try to solve two other problems.

(1) To define the general nature of private property, as it has arisen as a result of estranged labor, in its relation to truly human and social property.

(2) We have accepted the estrangement of labor, its alienation, as a fact, and we have analyzed this fact. How, we now ask, does man come to alienate, to estrange, his labor? How is this estrangement rooted in the nature of human development? We have already gone a long way to the solution of this problem by transforming the question of the origin of private property into the question of the relation of alienated labor to the course of humanity’s development. For when one speaks of private property, one thinks of dealing with something external to man. When one speaks of labor, one is directly dealing with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its solution.

As to (1): The general nature of private property and its relation to truly human property.

Alienated labor has resolved itself for us into two components which depend on one another, or which are but different expressions of one and the same relationship. Appropriation appears as estrangement, as alienation; and alienation appears as appropriation, estrangement as truly becoming a citizen.

We have considered the one side – alienated labor in relation to the worker himself, i.e., the relation of alienated labor to itself. The product, the necessary outcome of this relationship, as we have seen, is the property relation of the non-worker to the worker and to labor. Private property, as the material, summary expression of alienated labor, embraces both relations – the relation of the worker to work and to the product of his labor and to the non-worker, and the relation of the non-worker to the worker and to the product of his labor.

Having seen that in relation to the worker who appropriates nature by means of his labor, this appropriation appears as estrangement, his own spontaneous activity as activity for another and as activity of another, vitality as a sacrifice of life, production of the object as loss of the object to an alien power, to an alien person – we shall now consider the relation to the worker, to labor and its object of this person who is alien to labor and the worker.

First it has to be noted that everything which appears in the worker as an activity of alienation, of estrangement, appears in the non-worker as a state of alienation, of estrangement.

Secondly, that the worker’s real, practical attitude in production and to the product (as a state of mind) appears in the non-worker who confronting him as a theoretical attitude.

||XXVII| Thirdly, the non-worker does everything against the worker which the worker does against himself; but he does not do against himself what he does against the worker.

Let us look more closely at these three relations. |XXVII||

[First Manuscript breaks off here.]

Private Property and Communism

Re. p. XXXIX. [This refers to the missing part of the second manuscript. – Ed.] The antithesis between lack of property and property, so long as it is not comprehended as the antithesis of labour and capital, still remains an indifferent antithesis, not grasped in its active connection, in its internal relation, not yet grasped as a contradiction. It can find expression in this first form even without the advanced development of private property (as in ancient Rome, Turkey, etc.). It does not yet appear as having been established by private property itself. But labour, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitute private property as its developed state of contradiction – hence a dynamic relationship driving towards resolution.

The transcendence of self-estrangement follows the same course as self-estrangement. Private property is first considered only in its objective aspect – but nevertheless with labour as its essence. Its form of existence is therefore capital, which is to be annulled “as such” (Proudhon). Or a particular form of labour – labour leveled down, fragmented, and therefore unfree – is conceived as the source of private property’s perniciousness and of its existence in estrangement from men. For instance, Fourier, who, like the Physiocrats, also conceives agricultural labour to be at least the exemplary type, whereas Saint-Simon declares in contrast that industrial labour as such is the essence, and accordingly aspires to the exclusive rule of the industrialists and the improvement of the workers’ condition. Finally, communism is the positive expression of annulled private property – at first as universal private property.

By embracing this relation as a whole, communism is:

(1) In its first form only a generalization and consummation of it [of this relation]. As such it appears in a two-fold form: on the one hand, the dominion of material property bulks so large that it wants to destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed by all as private property. It wants to disregard talent, etc., in an arbitrary manner. For it the sole purpose of life and existence is direct, physical possession. The category of the worker is not done away with, but extended to all men. The relationship of private property persists as the relationship of the community to the world of things. Finally, this movement of opposing universal private property to private property finds expression in the brutish form of opposing to marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the community of women, in which a woman becomes a piece of communal and common property. It may be said that this idea of the community of women gives away the secret of this as yet completely crude and thoughtless communism.  Just as woman passes from marriage to general prostitution, [Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes – and the latter’s abomination is still greater – the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head. – Note by Marx so the entire world of wealth (that is, of man’s objective substance) passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of private property to a state of universal prostitution with the community. This type of communism – since it negates the personality of man in every sphere – is but the logical expression of private property, which is this negation. General envy constituting itself as a power is the disguise in which greed re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way. The thought of every piece of private property as such is at least turned against wealthier private property in the form of envy and the urge to reduce things to a common level, so that this envy and urge even constitute the essence of competition. Crude communism [the manuscript has: Kommunist. – Ed.] is only the culmination of this envy and of this leveling-down proceeding from the preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited standard. How little this annulment of private property is really an appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization, the regression to the unnatural  ||IV| simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even reached it.

The community is only a community of labour, and equality of wages paid out by communal capital – by the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined universality – labour as the category in which every person is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.

In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being.

The first positive annulment of private property – crude communism – is thus merely a manifestation of the vileness of private property, which wants to set itself up as the positive community system.

(2) Communism (α) still political in nature – democratic or despotic; (β) with the abolition of the state, yet still incomplete, and being still affected by private property, i.e., by the estrangement of man. In both forms communism already is aware of being reintegration or return of man to himself, the transcendence of human self-estrangement; but since it has not yet grasped the positive essence of private property, and just as little the human nature of need, it remains captive to it and infected by it. It has, indeed, grasped its concept, but not its essence.

(3) Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

||V| The entire movement of history, just as its [communism’s] actual act of genesis – the birth act of its empirical existence – is, therefore, for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming. Whereas the still immature communism seeks an historical proof for itself – a proof in the realm of what already exists – among disconnected historical phenomena opposed to private property, tearing single phases from the historical process and focusing attention on them as proofs of its historical pedigree (a hobby-horse ridden hard especially by Cabet, Villegardelle, etc.). By so doing it simply makes clear that by far the greater part of this process contradicts its own claim, and that, if it has ever existed, precisely its being in the past refutes its pretension to reality.

It is easy to see that the entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property – more precisely, in that of the economy.

This material, immediately perceptible private property is the material perceptible expression of estranged human life. Its movement – production and consumption – is the perceptible revelation of the movement of all production until now, i.e., the realization or the reality of man. Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of private property as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social, existence. Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of consciousness, of man’s inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life; its transcendence therefore embraces both aspects. It is evident that the initial stage of the movement amongst the various peoples depends on whether the true recognized life of the people manifests itself more in consciousness or in the external world – is more ideal or real. Communism begins from the outset (Owen) with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction.

The philanthropy of atheism is therefore at first only philosophical, abstract philanthropy, and that of communism is at once real and directly bent on action.

We have seen how on the assumption of positively annulled private property man produces man – himself and the other man; how the object, being the direct manifestation of his individuality, is simultaneously his own existence for the other man, the existence of the other man, and that existence for him. Likewise, however, both the material of labour and man as the subject, are the point of departure as well as the result of the movement (and precisely in this fact, that they must constitute the point of departure, lies the historical necessity of private property). Thus the social character is the general character of the whole movement: just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him. Activity and enjoyment, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are social: social activity and social enjoyment. The human aspect of nature exists only for social man; for only then does nature exist for him as a bond with man – as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him – and as the life-element of human reality. Only then does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence. Only here has what is to him his natural existence become his human existence, and nature become man for him. Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature – the true resurrection of nature – the consistent naturalism of man and the consistent humanism of nature.

||VI| Social activity and social enjoyment exist by no means only in the form of some directly communal activity and directly communal enjoyment, although communal activity and communal enjoyment – i.e., activity and enjoyment which are manifested and affirmed in actual direct association with other men – will occur wherever such a direct expression of sociability stems from the true character of the activity’s content and is appropriate to the nature of the enjoyment.

But also when I am active scientifically, etc. – an activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others – then my activity is social, because I perform it as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.

My general consciousness is only the theoretical shape of that of which the living shape is the real community, the social fabric, although at the present day general consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such confronts it with hostility. The activity of my general consciousness, as an activity, is therefore also my theoretical existence as a social being.

Above all we must avoid postulating “society” again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being. His manifestations of life – even if they may not appear in the direct form of communal manifestations of life carried out in association with others – are therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man’s individual and species-life are not different, however much – and this is inevitable – the mode of existence of the individual is a more particular or more general mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual life.

In his consciousness of species man confirms his real social life and simply repeats his real existence in thought, just as conversely the being of the species confirms itself in species consciousness and exists for itself in its generality as a thinking being.

Man, much as he may therefore be a particular individual (and it is precisely his particularity which makes him an individual, and a real individual social being), is just as much the totality – the ideal totality – the subjective existence of imagined and experienced society for itself; just as he exists also in the real world both as awareness and real enjoyment of social existence, and as a totality of human manifestation of life.

Thinking and being are thus certainly distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with each other.

Death seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the particular individual and to contradict their unity. But the particular individual is only a particular species being, and as such mortal.

[In the manuscript: “5”. – Ed.]

(4)  Just as private property is only the perceptible expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object; just as it expresses the fact that the manifestation of his life is the alienation of his life, that his realization is his loss of reality, is an alien reality: so, the positive transcendence of private property – i.e., the perceptible appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human achievements should not be conceived merely in the sense of immediate, one-sided enjoyment, merely in the sense of possessing, of having. Man appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form,

||VII| are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality. Their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality, [For this reason it is just as highly varied as the determinations of human essence and activities. – Note by Marx] it is human activity and human suffering, for suffering, humanly considered, is a kind of self-enjoyment of man.

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realizations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital.

In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world. [On the category of “having”, see Hess in the Philosophy of the Deed].

The abolition [Aufhebung] of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object – an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, [In practice I can relate myself to a thing humanly only if the thing relates itself humanly to the human being. – Note by Marx] and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost its egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use.

In the same way, the senses and enjoyment of other men have become my own appropriation. Besides these direct organs, therefore, social organs develop in the form of society; thus, for instance, activity in direct association with others, etc., has become an organ for expressing my own life, and a mode of appropriating human life.

It is obvious that the human eye enjoys things in a way different from the crude, non-human eye; the human ear different from the crude ear, etc.

We have seen that man does not lose himself in his object only when the object becomes for him a human object or objective man. This is possible only when the object becomes for him a social object, he himself for himself a social being, just as society becomes a being for him in this object.

On the one hand, therefore, it is only when the objective world becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man’s essential powers – human reality, and for that reason the reality of his own essential powers – that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, become objects which confirm and realize his individuality, become his objects: that is, man himself becomes the object. The manner in which they become his depends on the nature of the objects and on the nature of the essential power corresponding to it; for it is precisely the determinate nature of this relationship which shapes the particular, real mode of affirmation. To the eye an object comes to be other than it is to the ear, and the object of the eye is another object than the object of the ear. The specific character of each essential power is precisely its specific essence, and therefore also the specific mode of its objectification, of its objectively actual, living being. Thus man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, ||VIII| but with all his senses.

On the other hand, let us look at this in its subjective aspect. Just as only music awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear – is [no] object for it, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers – it can therefore only exist for me insofar as my essential power exists for itself as a subjective capacity; because the meaning of an object for me goes only so far as my sense goes (has only a meaning for a sense corresponding to that object) – for this reason the senses of the social man differ from those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanized nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present. The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract existence as food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals. The care-burdened, poverty-stricken man has no sense for the finest play; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value but not the beauty and the specific character of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense. Thus, the objectification of the human essence, both in its theoretical and practical aspects, is required to make man’s sense human, as well as to create the human sense corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural substance.

Just as through the movement of private property, of its wealth as well as its poverty – of its material and spiritual wealth and poverty – the budding society finds at hand all the material for this development, so established society produces man in this entire richness of his being produces the rich man profoundly endowed with all the senses – as its enduring reality.

We see how subjectivity and objectivity, spirituality and materiality, activity  [Tätigkeit] and suffering, lose their antithetical character, and – thus their existence as such antitheses only within the framework of society; <we see how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of man. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of understanding, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one.

We see how the history of industry and the established objective existence of industry are the open book of man’s essential powers, the perceptibly existing human psychology. Hitherto this was not conceived in its connection with man’s essential being, but only in an external relation of utility, because, moving in the realm of estrangement, people could only think of man’s general mode of being – religion or history in its abstract-general character as politics, art, literature, etc. – ||IX| as the reality of man’s essential powers and man’s species-activity. We have before us the objectified essential powers of man in the form of sensuous, alien, useful objects, in the form of estrangement, displayed in ordinary material industry (which can be conceived either as a part of that general movement, or that movement can be conceived as a particular part of industry, since all human activity hitherto has been labour – that is, industry – activity estranged from itself).

A psychology for which this book, the part of history existing in the most perceptible and accessible form, remains a closed book, cannot become a genuine, comprehensive and real science. What indeed are we to think of a science which airily abstracts from this large part of human labour and which fails to feel its own incompleteness, while such a wealth of human endeavour, unfolded before it, means nothing more to it than, perhaps, what can be expressed in one word – “need”, “vulgar need”?

The natural sciences have developed an enormous activity and have accumulated an ever-growing mass of material. Philosophy, however, has remained just as alien to them as they remain to philosophy. Their momentary unity was only a chimerical illusion. The will was there, but the power was lacking. Historiography itself pays regard to natural science only occasionally, as a factor of enlightenment, utility, and of some special great discoveries. But natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, although its immediate effect had to be the furthering of the dehumanization of man. Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric revelation of man’s essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man. In consequence, natural science will lose its abstractly material – or rather, its idealistic – tendency, and will become the basis of human science, as it has already become – albeit in an estranged form – the basis of actual human life, and to assume one basis for life and a different basis for science is as a matter of course a lie. The nature which develops in human history – the genesis of human society – is man’s real nature; hence nature as it develops through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature.

Sense perception (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Only when it proceeds from sense perception in the two-fold form of sensuous consciousness and sensuous need – is it true science. All history is the history of preparing and developing “man” to become the object of sensuous consciousness, and turning the requirements of “man as man” into his needs. History itself is a real part of natural history – of nature developing into man. Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.

||X| Man is the immediate object of natural science; for immediate, sensuous nature for man is, immediately, human sensuousness (the expressions are identical) – presented immediately in the form of the other man sensuously present for him. Indeed, his own sense perception first exists as human sensuousness for himself through the other man. But nature is the immediate object of the science of man: the first object of man – man – is nature, sensuousness; and the particular human sensuous essential powers can only find their self-understanding in the science of the natural world in general, just as they can find their objective realization only in natural objects. The element of thought itself – the element of thought’s living expression – language – is of a sensuous nature. The social reality of nature, and human natural science, or the natural science of man, are identical terms.

It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy come the rich human being and the rich human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human manifestations of life – the man in whom his own realization exists as an inner necessity, as need. Not only wealth, but likewise the poverty of man – under the assumption of socialism – receives in equal measure a human and therefore social significance. Poverty is the passive bond which causes the human being to experience the need of the greatest wealth – the other human being. The dominion of the objective being in me, the sensuous outburst of my life activity, is passion, which thus becomes here the activity of my being.

(5) A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life, but if he has, moreover, created my life – if he is the source of my life. When it is not of my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside of it. The Creation is therefore an idea very difficult to dislodge from popular consciousness. The fact that nature and man exist on their own account is incomprehensible to it, because it contradicts everything tangible in practical life.

The creation of the earth has received a mighty blow from geognosy – i.e., from the science which presents the formation of the earth, the development of the earth, as a process, as a self-generation. Generatio aequivoca is the only practical refutation of the theory of creation.

Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said: You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings – a species-act of human beings – has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect – the infinite progression which leads you further to inquire: Who begot my father? Who his grandfather? etc.

You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in procreation, man thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progress which drives me ever further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask yourself whether that progress as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent,||XI| then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?

You can reply: I do not want to postulate the nothingness of nature, etc. I ask you about its genesis, just as I ask the anatomist about the formation of bones, etc.

But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis. Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man – a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man – has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society. |XI|

Third manuscript ends.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) finished university and immediately gained a job as chair of philosophy at Basle University.  He was close to his younger sister Elisabeth who allegedly became associated with Nazism.  Nietzsche was a cultural critic and philosopher.  His interests crossed multidisciplinary epistemologies.  In general, he provided for a critique of religion and morality, and at one point, he attempted to bring rationality to religion.  The Overman is a complex analytical tool to explain why certain individuals embody higher values while others do not. Nietzsche confronted the liberal idea of individuality as well as self-interest in order to explore a deeper psychological element to individuality.  Nietzsche, intentionally or not, demonstrates an inclination for Cartesian dualism particularly when demonstrating that the individual is independent of the sovereign self.  As Nietzsche evaluates his position on morality, his critiques of religion, philosophy, and morality afford him a strategy for an argumentation on the nature of reason from a psychological perspective.  The ‘master-slave,’ for which Nietzsche is well known, is a complicated relationship that is not necessarily economic in nature, but it trespasses morality and politics.  Based on his writings, one may conclude that aristocrats were better fit for governance.  Nietzsche may well fit in the nihilist or the existentialist schools of thought of the turn of the 20th century.  He accepted the concept that man must understand existence beyond good and evil.  Even though he suffered with physical and mental ailments, he wrote a number of texts On The Genealogy, The Antichrist, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and All Too Human.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra[6]

ZARATHUSTRA’S PROLOGUE.[7]

1.

When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the lake of his home, and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and solitude, and for ten years did not weary of it. But at last his heart changed,—and rising one morning with the rosy dawn, he went before the sun, and spoke thus unto it:

You great star! What would be thy happiness if thou had not those for whom thou shine!

For ten years hast thou climbed hither unto my cave: thou wouldst have wearied of thy light and of the journey, had it not been for me, mine eagle, and my serpent.

But we awaited thee every morning, took your overflow and blessed thee for it.

Lo! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that hath gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it.

I would fain bestow and distribute, until the wise have once more become joyous in their folly, and the poor happy in their riches.

Therefore must I descend into the depths: as you do in the evening, when you go behind the sea, and give light also to the netherworld, thou exuberant star!

Like thee must I GO UNDER, as men say, to whom I shall descend.

Bless me, then, thou tranquil eye, that canst behold even the greatest happiness without envy!

Bless the cup that is about to overflow, that the water may flow golden out of it, and carry everywhere the reflection of thy bliss!

Lo! This cup is again going to empty itself, and Zarathustra is again going to be a man.

Thus began Zarathustra’s down-going.

2.

Zarathustra went down the mountain alone, no one meeting him. When he entered the forest, however, there suddenly stood before him an old man, who had left his holy cot to seek roots. And thus spoke the old man to Zarathustra:

“No stranger to me is this wanderer: many years ago passed he by. Zarathustra he was called; but he hath altered.

Then you carry your ashes into the mountains: would you now carry your fire into the valleys? Fear you not the incendiary’s doom [arsonist]?

Yea, I recognize Zarathustra. Pure is his eye, and no loathing lurks about his mouth. Go he not along like a dancer?

Altered is Zarathustra; a child hath Zarathustra become; an awakened one is Zarathustra: what would you do in the land of the sleepers?

As in the sea had you lived in solitude, and it has born you up. Alas, would you now go ashore? Alas, would you again drag your body yourself?”

Zarathustra answered: “I love mankind.”

“Why,” said the saint, “did I go into the forest and the desert? Was it not because I loved men far too well?

Now I love God: men, I do not love. Man is a thing too imperfect for me. Love to man would be fatal to me.”

Zarathustra answered: “What spoke I of love! I am bringing gifts unto men.”

“Give them nothing,” said the saint. “Take rather part of their load, and carry it along with them—that will be most agreeable unto them: if only it be agreeable unto thee!

If, however, you would give unto them, give them no more than an alms, and let them also beg for it!”

“No,” replied Zarathustra, “I give no alms. I am not poor enough for that.”

The saint laughed at Zarathustra, and spoke thus: “Then see to it that they accept your treasures! They are distrustful of anchorites, and do not believe that we come with gifts.

The fall of our footsteps ring too hollow through their streets. And just as at night, when they are in bed and hear a man abroad long before sunrise, so they ask themselves concerning us: Where does the thief go?

Go not to men, but stay in the forest! Go rather to the animals! Why not be like me—a bear amongst bears, a bird amongst birds?”

“And what does the saint  do in the forest?” asked Zarathustra.

The saint answered: “I make hymns and sing them; and in making hymns I laugh and weep and mumble: thus do I praise God.

With singing, weeping, laughing, and mumbling do I praise the God who is my God. But what do you bring us as a gift?”

When Zarathustra had heard these words, he bowed to the saint and said: “What should I have to give to you? Let me rather go quickly lest I take something away from you!”—And thus they parted from one another, the old man and Zarathustra, laughing like schoolboys.

When Zarathustra was alone, however, he said to his heart: “Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest has not yet heard of it, that GOD IS DEAD!”

3.

When Zarathustra arrived at the nearest town which was close to the forest, he found many people assembled in the market place; for it had been announced that a rope-dancer would give a performance. And Zarathustra spoke thus unto the people:

I TEACH YOU THE Overman (Übermesch). Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have you done to surpass Overman?

All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man?

What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Overman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.

You have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were you apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I bid you become phantoms or plants?

Lo, I teach you the Overman!

The Overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Overman SHALL BE the meaning of the earth!

I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of super earthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not.

Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!

Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God is dead, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dread fullest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!

Once the soul looked contemptuously on the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing:—the soul wished the body meager, ghastly, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth.

Oh, that soul was itself meager, ghastly, and famished; and cruelty was the delight of that soul!

But ye, also, my brethren, tell me: What does your body say about your soul? Is your soul not poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency?

Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.

Lo, I teach you the Overman: he is that sea; in him can your great contempt be submerged.

What is the greatest thing ye can experience? It is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness become loathsome unto you, and so also your reason and virtue.

The hour when you say: “What good is my happiness! It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency. But my happiness should justify existence itself!”

The hour when you say: “What good is my reason! Does it long for knowledge as the lion for his food? It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency!”

The hour when you say: “What good is my virtue! As yet it has not made me passionate. How weary I am of my good and my bad! It is all poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency!”

The hour when you say: “What good is my justice! I do not see that I am fervour and fuel. The just, however, are fervour and fuel!”

The hour when you say: “What good is my pity! Is not pity the cross on which he is nailed who love man? But my pity is not a crucifixion.”

Have you ever spoken thus? Have you ever cried thus? Ah! would that I had heard you crying thus!

It is not your sin—it is your self-satisfaction that cry unto heaven; your very sparingness in sin cry unto heaven!

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with which you should be inoculated?

Lo, I teach you the Overman: he is that lightning, he is that frenzy!—

When Zarathustra had thus spoken, one of the people called out: “We have now heard enough of the rope dancer; it is time now for us to see him!” And all the people laughed at Zarathustra. But the rope dancer, who thought the words applied to him, began his performance.

4.

Zarathustra, however, looked at the people and wondered. Then he spoke thus:

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.

A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING [overture] and a DOWN-GOING [going under].

I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.

I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.

I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Overman may hereafter arrive.

I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Overman may hereafter live. Thus seeks he his own down-going.

I love him who labours and invents, that he may build the house for the Overman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going.

I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.

I love him who reserves no share of spirit for himself, but wants to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walks he as spirit over the bridge.

I love him who makes his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more.

I love him who desires not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one’s destiny to cling to.

I love him whose soul is lavish, who wants no thanks and doth not give back: for he always bestows, and desires not to keep for himself.

I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favour, and who then asks: “Am I a dishonest player?”—for he is willing to succumb.

I love him who scatters golden words in advance of his deeds, and always doeth more than he promises: for he seeks his own down-going.

I love him who justifies the future ones, and redeems the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones.

I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God.

I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goes he willingly over the bridge.

I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his down-going.

I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causes his down-going.

I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds.

Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the OVERMAN.—

5.

When Zarathustra had spoken these words, he again looked at the people, and was silent. “There they stand,” said he to his heart; “there they laugh: they understand me not; I am not the mouth for these ears.

Must one first batter their ears, that they may learn to hear with their eyes? Must one clatter like kettledrums and penitential preachers? Or do they only believe the stammer?

They have something whereof they are proud. What do they call it, that which makes them proud? Culture, they call it; it distinguishes them from the goatherds.

They dislike, therefore, to hear of ‘contempt’ of themselves. So I will appeal to their pride.

I will speak unto them of the most contemptible thing: that, however, is THE LAST MAN!”

And thus spoke Zarathustra unto the people:

It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the germ of his highest hope.

Still is his soil rich enough for it. But that soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow thereon.

Alas! there cometh the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man—and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whizz!

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.

Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.

Lo! I show you THE LAST MAN.

“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?”—so asks the last man and blinks.

The earth has then become small, and on it there hopes the last man who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man lives longest.

“We have discovered happiness”—say the last men, and blink thereby.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loves one’s neighbour and rubs against him; for one needs warmth.

Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or men!

A little poison now and then: that makes pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.

One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.

No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wants the same; every one is equal: he who has other sentiments goes voluntarily into the madhouse.

“Formerly all the world was insane,”—say the subtlest of them, and blink thereby.

They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall out, but are soon reconciled—otherwise it spoils their stomachs.

They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.

“We have discovered happiness,”—say the last men, and blink thereby.—

And here ended the first discourse of Zarathustra, which is also called “The Prologue”: for at this point the shouting and mirth of the multitude interrupted him. “Give us this last man, O Zarathustra,”—they called out—“make us into these last men! Then will we make thee a present of the Overman!” And all the people exulted and smacked their lips. Zarathustra, however, turned sad, and said to his heart:

“They understand me not: I am not the mouth for these ears.

Too long, perhaps, have I lived in the mountains; too much have I hearkened unto the brooks and trees: now do I speak unto them as unto the goatherds.

Calm is my soul, and clear, like the mountains in the morning. But they think me cold, and a mocker with terrible jests.

And now do they look at me and laugh: and while they laugh they hate me too. There is ice in their laughter.”

6.

Then, however, something happened which made every mouth mute and every eye fixed. In the meantime, of course, the rope-dancer had commenced his performance: he had come out at a little door, and was going along the rope which was stretched between two towers, so that it hung above the marketplace and the people. When he was just midway across, the little door opened once more, and a gaudily dressed fellow like a buffoon sprang out, and went rapidly after the first one. “Go on, halt-foot,” cried his frightful voice, “go on, lazy-bones, interloper, sallow-face!—Lest I tickle you with my heel! What do you here between the towers? In the tower is the place for you, you should be locked up; to one better than yourself you block the way!”—And with every word he came nearer and nearer the first one. When, however, he was but a step behind, there happened the frightful thing which made every mouth mute and every eye fixed—he uttered a yell like a devil, and jumped over the other who was in his way. The latter, however, when he thus saw his rival triumph, lost at the same time his head and his footing on the rope; he threw his pole away, and shot downwards faster than it, like an eddy of arms and legs, into the depth. The marketplace and the people were like the sea when the storm comes on: they all flew apart and in disorder, especially where the body was about to fall.

Zarathustra, however, remained standing, and just beside him fell the body, badly injured and disfigured, but not yet dead. After a while consciousness returned to the shattered man, and he saw Zarathustra kneeling beside him. “What are you doing there?” he said at last, “I knew long ago that the devil would trip me up. Now he dragged me to hell: would you prevent him?”

“On mine honour, my friend,” answered Zarathustra, “there is nothing of all that whereof you speak: there is no devil and no hell. Your soul will be dead even sooner than your body: fear, therefore, nothing any more!”

The man looked up distrustfully. “If you speak the truth,” he said, “I lose nothing when I lose my life. I am not much more than an animal which hath been taught to dance by blows and scanty fare.”

“Not at all,” said Zarathustra, “you have made danger thy calling; therein there is nothing contemptible. Now you perish by your calling: therefore will I bury you with my own hands.”

When Zarathustra had said this the dying one did not reply further; but he moved his hand as if he sought the hand of Zarathustra in gratitude.

7.

Meanwhile the evening came on, and the marketplace veiled itself in gloom. Then the people dispersed, for even curiosity and terror become fatigued. Zarathustra, however, still sat beside the dead man on the ground, absorbed in thought: so he forgot the time. But at last it became night, and a cold wind blew upon the lonely one. Then arose Zarathustra and said to his heart:

Verily, a fine catch of fish hath Zarathustra made today! It is not a man he has caught, but a corpse.

Sombre is human life, and as yet without meaning: a buffoon may be fateful to it.

I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Overman, the lightning out of the dark cloud—man.

But still am I far from them, and my sense speaks not unto their sense. To men I am still something between a fool and a corpse.

Gloomy is the night, gloomy are the ways of Zarathustra. Come, thou cold and stiff companion! I carry thee to the place where I shall bury thee with mine own hands.

8.

When Zarathustra had said this to his heart, he put the corpse upon his shoulders and set out on his way. Yet had he not gone a hundred steps, when there stole a man up to him and whispered in his ear—and lo! He that spoke was the buffoon from the tower. “Leave this town, O Zarathustra,” he said, “there are too many here who hate you. The good and just hate you, and call you their enemy and despiser; the believers in the orthodox belief hate you, and call you a danger to the multitude. It was your good fortune to be laughed at: and verily you spoke like a buffoon. It was thy good fortune to associate with the dead dog; by so humiliating yourself you have saved your life today. Depart, however, from this town,—or tomorrow I shall jump over thee, a living man over a dead one.” And when he had said this, the buffoon vanished; Zarathustra, however, went on through the dark streets.

At the gate of the town the gravediggers met him: they shone their torch on his face, and, recognizing Zarathustra, they sorely derided him. “Zarathustra is carrying away the dead dog: a fine thing that Zarathustra hath turned a gravedigger! For our hands are too cleanly for that roast. Will Zarathustra steal the bite from the devil? Well then, good luck to the repast! If only the devil is not a better thief than Zarathustra!—He will steal them both, he will eat them both!” And they laughed among themselves, and put their heads together.

Zarathustra made no answer thereto, but went on his way. When he had gone on for two hours, past forests and swamps, he had heard too much of the hungry howling of the wolves, and he himself became a-hungry. So he halted at a lonely house in which a light was burning.

“Hunger attacks me,” said Zarathustra, “like a robber. Among forests and swamps my hunger attacks me, and late in the night.

“Strange humours hath my hunger. Often it cometh to me only after a repast, and all day it hath failed to come: where hath it been?”

And thereupon Zarathustra knocked at the door of the house. An old man appeared, who carried a light, and asked: “Who comes unto me and my bad sleep?”

“A living man and a dead one,” said Zarathustra. “Give me something to eat and drink, I forgot it during the day. He that feeds the hungry refreshes his own soul, says wisdom.”

The old man withdrew, but came back immediately and offered Zarathustra bread and wine. “A bad country for the hungry,” said he; “that is why I live here. Animal and man come unto me, the anchorite. But bid thy companion eat and drink also, he is wearier than you.” Zarathustra answered: “My companion is dead; I shall hardly be able to persuade him to eat.” “That does not concern me,” said the old man sullenly; “he that knocks at my door must take what I offer him. Eat, and farewell!”—

Thereafter Zarathustra again went on for two hours, trusting to the path and the light of the stars: for he was an experienced nightwalker, and liked to look into the face of all that slept. When the morning dawned, however, Zarathustra found himself in a thick forest, and no path was any longer visible. He then put the dead man in a hollow tree at his head—for he wanted to protect him from the wolves—and laid himself down on the ground and moss. And immediately he fell asleep, tired in body, but with a tranquil soul.

9.

Long slept Zarathustra; and not only the rosy dawn passed over his head, but also the morning. At last, however, his eyes opened, and amazedly he gazed into the forest and the stillness, amazedly he gazed into himself. Then he arose quickly, like a seafarer who all at once sees the land; and he shouted for joy: for he saw a new truth. And he spoke thus to his heart:

A light has dawned upon me: I need companions—living ones; not dead companions and corpses, which I carry with me where I will.

But I need living companions, who will follow me because they want to follow themselves—and to the place where I will.

A light hath dawned upon me. Not to the people is Zarathustra to speak, but to companions! Zarathustra shall not be the herd’s herdsman and hound!

To allure many from the herd—for that purpose have I come. The people and the herd must be angry with me: a robber shall Zarathustra be called by the herdsmen.

Herdsmen, I say, but they call themselves the good and just. Herdsmen, I say, but they call themselves the believers in the orthodox belief.

Behold the good and just! Whom do they hate most? Him who breaks up their tables of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker:—he, however, is the creator.

Behold the believers of all beliefs! Whom do they hate most? Him who breaks up their tables of values, the breaker, the law breaker—he, however, is the creator.

Companions, the creator seeks, not corpses—and not herds or believers either. Fellow-creators the creator seeks—those who grave new values on new tables.

Companions, the creator seeks, and fellow-reapers: for everything is ripe for the harvest with him. But he lacks the hundred sickles: so he plucks the ears of corn and is vexed.

Companions, the creator seeks, and such as know how to whet their sickles. Destroyers, will they be called, and despisers of good and evil. But they are the reapers and rejoicers.

Fellow-creators, Zarathustra seeks; fellow-reapers and fellow-rejoicers, Zarathustra seeks: what has he to do with herds and herdsmen and corpses!

And you, my first companion, rest in peace! Well have I buried you in your hollow tree; well have I hid you from the wolves.

But I part from you; the time has arrived. ‘Twixt rosy dawn and rosy dawn there came unto me a new truth.

I am not to be a herdsman, I am not to be a gravedigger. Not any more will I discourse unto the people; for the last time have I spoken unto the dead.

With the creators, the reapers, and the rejoicers will I associate: the rainbow will I show them, and all the stairs to the Overman.

To the lone-dwellers will I sing my song, and to the two-dwellers; and unto him who has still ears for the unheard, will I make the heart heavy with my happiness.

I make for my goal, I follow my course; over the loitering and tardy will I leap. Thus let my on-going be their down-going!

10.

This had Zarathustra said to his heart when the sun stood at noontide. Then he looked inquiringly aloft,—for he heard above him the sharp call of a bird. And behold! An eagle swept through the air in wide circles, and on it hung a serpent, not like a prey, but like a friend: for it kept itself coiled round the eagle’s neck.

“They are mine animals,” said Zarathustra, and rejoiced in his heart.

“The proudest animal under the sun, and the wisest animal under the sun,—They have come out to reconnoitre.

They want to know whether Zarathustra still lives. Verily, do I still live?

More dangerous have I found it among men than among animals; in dangerous paths goes Zarathustra. Let mine animals lead me!

When Zarathustra had said this, he remembered the words of the saint in the forest. Then he sighed and spoke thus to his heart:

“Would that I were wiser! Would that I were wise from the very heart, like my serpent!

But I am asking the impossible. Therefore do I ask my pride to go always with my wisdom!

And if my wisdom should some day forsake me:—Alas! It loves to fly away!—May my pride then fly with my folly!”

Thus began Zarathustra’s down-going.

1. WAR AND WARRIORS.

By our best enemies we do not want to be spared, nor by those either whom we love from the very heart. So let me tell you the truth!

My brethren in war! I love you from the very heart. I am, and was ever, your counterpart. And I am also your best enemy. So let me tell you the truth!

I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. You are not great enough not to know of hatred and envy. Then be great enough not to be ashamed of them!

And if you cannot be saints of knowledge, then, I pray you, be at least its warriors. They are the companions and forerunners of such saint ship.

I see many soldiers; could I but see many warriors! “Uniform” one calls what they wear; may it not be uniform what they therewith hide!

You shall be those whose eyes ever seek for an enemy—for YOUR enemy. And with some of you there is hatred at first sight.

Your enemy shall you seek; your war shall you wage, and for the sake of your thoughts! And if your thoughts succumb, your uprightness shall still shout triumph thereby!

You shall love peace as a means to new wars—and the short peace more than the long.

You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not to peace, but to victory. Let your work be a fight, let your peace be a victory!

One can only be silent and sit peacefully when one has arrow and bow; otherwise one prates and quarrels. Let your peace be a victory!

You say it is the good cause which hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which hallows every cause.

War and courage have done more great things than charity. Not your sympathy, but your bravery has hitherto saved the victims.

“What is good?” you ask. To be brave is good. Let the little girls say: “To be good is what is pretty, and at the same time touching.”

They call you heartless: but your heart is true, and I love the bashfulness of your goodwill. You are ashamed of your flow, and others are ashamed of their ebb.

You are ugly? Well then, my brethren, take the sublime about you, the mantle of the ugly!

And when your soul becomes great, then does it become haughty, and in your sublimity there is wickedness. I know you.

In wickedness the haughty man and the weakling meet. But they misunderstand one another. I know you.

You shall only have enemies to be hated, but not enemies to be despised. You must be proud of your enemies; then, the successes of your enemies are also your successes.

Resistance—that is the distinction of the slave. Let your distinction be obedience. Let your commanding itself be obeying!

To the good warrior sounds “thou shalt” pleasanter than “I will.” And all that is dear unto you, you shall first have it commanded unto you.

Let your love to life be love to your highest hope; and let your highest hope be the highest thought of life!

Your highest thought, however, you shall have it commanded unto you by me—and it is this: man is something that is to be surpassed.

So live your life of obedience and of war! What matter about long life! What warrior wishes to be spared!

I spare you not, I love you from my very heart, my brethren in war!—

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

1. THE NEW IDOL.

Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not with us, my brethren: here there are states.

A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears unto me, for now will I say unto you my word concerning the death of peoples.

A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies also; and this lie creeps from its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.”

It is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.

Destroyers are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.

Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs.

This sign I give unto you: every people speaks its language of good and evil: this its neighbour understands not. Its language hath it devised for itself in laws and customs.

But the state tells lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies; and whatever it has it has stolen.

False is everything in it; with stolen teeth it bites, the biting one. False are even its bowels.

Confusion of language of good and evil; this sign I give unto you as the sign of the state. Verily, the will to death, indicates this sign! Verily, it beckons unto the preachers of death!

Many too many are born: for the superfluous ones was the state devised!

See just how it entices them to it, the many-too-many! How it swallows and chews and rechews them!

“On earth there is nothing greater than I: it is I who am the regulating finger of God”—Thus roars the monster. And not only the long-eared and shortsighted fall upon their knees!

Ah! Even in your ears, you great souls, it whispers its gloomy lies! Ah! it finds out the rich hearts which willingly lavish themselves!

Yea, it finds you out too, ye conquerors of the old God! Weary ye became of the conflict, and now your weariness serves the new idol!

Heroes and honourable ones, it would fain set up around it, the new idol! Gladly it basks in the sunshine of good consciences,—the cold monster!

Everything will it give YOU, if You worship it, the new idol: thus it purchases the luster of your virtue, and the glance of your proud eyes.

It seeks to allure by means of you, the many-too-many! Yea, a hellish artifice has here been devised, a death-horse jingling with the trappings of divine honours!

Yea, a dying for many has here been devised, which glorifies itself as life: verily, a hearty service unto all preachers of death!

The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all—is called “life.”

Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture, they call their theft—and everything becomes sickness and trouble unto them!

Just see these superfluous ones! Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves.

Just see these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money—these impotent ones!

See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud and the abyss.

Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness—as if happiness sat on the throne! Often times sits filth on the throne.—And often times also the throne on filth.

Madmen they all seem to me, and clambering apes, and too eager. Badly smells their idol to me, the cold monster: badly they all smell to me, these idolaters.

My brethren, will you suffocate in the fumes of their maws and appetites! Better break the windows and jump into the open air!

Do go out of the way of the bad odour! Withdraw from the idolatry of the superfluous!

Do go out of the way of the bad odour! Withdraw from the steam of these human sacrifices!

Open still remains the earth for great souls. Empty are still many sites for lone ones and twain ones, around which floats the odour of tranquil seas.

Open still remains a free life for great souls. Verily, he who possesses little is so much the less possessed: blessed be moderate poverty!

There, where the state ceases—there only commences the man who is not superfluous: there commences the song of the necessary ones, the single and irreplaceable melody.

There, where the state CEASES—pray look thither, my brethren! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the Superman?—

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

LXXIII. THE HIGHER MAN.

1.

When I came unto men for the first time, then did I commit the anchorite folly, the great folly: I appeared on the marketplace.

And when I spoke unto all, I spoke unto none. In the evening, however, rope-dancers were my companions, and corpses; and I myself almost a corpse.

With the new morning, however, there came unto me a new truth: then did I learn to say: “Of what account to me are market-place and populace and populace-noise and long populace-ears!”

You higher men, learn THIS from me: On the marketplace no one believes in higher men. But if ye will speak there, very well! The populace, however, blinks: “We are all equal.”

“You higher men,”—so blinks the populace—“there are no higher men, we are all equal; man is man, before God—we are all equal!”

Before God!—Now, however, this God has died. Before the populace, however, we will not be equal. Ye higher men, away from the marketplace!

2.

Before God!—Now however this God has died! You higher men, this God was your greatest danger.

Only since he lay in the grave have you again arisen. Now only comes the great noontide, now only doth the higher man become—master!

Have you understood this word, O my brethren? You are frightened: do your hearts turn giddy? Does the abyss here yawn for you? Doth the hell-hound here help at you?

Well! Take heart! you higher men! Now only travails the mountain of the human future. God has died: now do WE desire—the Superman to live.

3.

The most careful ask today: “How is man to be maintained?” Zarathustra however asks, as the first and only one: “How is man to be SURPASSED?”

The Superman, I have at heart; THAT is the first and only thing to me—and NOT man: not the neighbour, not the poorest, not the sorriest, not the best.—

O my brethren, what I can love in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going. And also in you there is much that makes me love and hope.

In that you have despised, you higher men, that makes me hope. For the great despisers are the great reverers.

In that you have despaired, there is much to honour. For you have not learned to submit yourselves, you have not learned petty policy.

For today have the petty people become master: they all preach submission and humility and policy and diligence and consideration and the long et cetera of petty virtues.

Whatever is of the effeminate type, whatever originates from the servile type, and especially the populace-mishmash:—THAT wishes now to be master of all human destiny—O disgust! Disgust! Disgust!

THAT asks and asks and never tires: “How is man to maintain himself best, longest, most pleasantly?” Thereby—are they the masters of today.

These masters of today—surpass them, O my brethren—these petty people: THEY are the Superman’s greatest danger!

Surpass, you higher men, the petty virtues, the petty policy, the sand-grain considerateness, the anthill trumpery, the pitiable comfortableness, the “happiness of the greatest number”—!

And rather despair than submit yourselves. And verily, I love you, because you know not today how to live, you higher men! For thus do YOU live—best!

4.

Have you courage, O my brethren? Are you stout-hearted? NOT the courage before witnesses, but anchorite and eagle courage, which not even a God any longer behold?

Cold souls, mules, the blind and the drunken, I do not call stout-hearted. He has heart who knows fear, but VANQUISHES it; who sees the abyss, but with PRIDE.

He who sees the abyss, but with eagle’s eyes,—he who with eagle’s talons GRASPS the abyss: he has courage.—

5.

“Man is evil”—so said to me for consolation, all the wisest ones. Ah, if only it be still true today! For the evil is man’s best force.

“Man must become better and eviler”—so do I teach. The evilest is necessary for the Superman’s best.

It may have been well for the preacher of the petty people to suffer and be burdened by men’s sin. I, however, rejoice in great sin as my great CONSOLATION.—

Such things, however, are not said for long ears. Every word, also, is not suited for every mouth. These are fine far-away things: at them sheep’s claws shall not grasp!

6.

You higher men, think you that I am here to put right what you have put wrong?

Or that I wished henceforth to make snugger couches for you sufferers? Or show you restless, miswandering (gone astray), misclimbing (climbed astray) ones, new and easier footpaths?

No! No! Three times No! Always more, always better ones of your type shall succumb,—for you shall always have it worse and harder. Thus only—

—Thus only grows man aloft to the height where the lightning strikes and shatters him: high enough for the lightning!

Towards the few, the long, the remote go forth my soul and my seeking: of what account to me are your many little, short miseries!

You do not yet suffer enough for me! For you suffer from yourselves, you have not yet suffered FROM MAN. You would lie if you spoke otherwise! None of you suffers from what have suffered.

7.

It is not enough for me that the lightning no longer does harm. I do not wish to conduct it away: it shall learn—to work for ME.

My wisdom has accumulated long like a cloud, it becomes stiller and darker. So does all wisdom which shall one day bear LIGHTNINGS.

Unto these men of today will I not be LIGHT, nor be called light. THEM—will I blind: lightning of my wisdom! Put out their eyes!

8.

Do not will anything beyond your power: there is a bad falseness in those who will beyond their power.

Especially when they will great things! For they awaken distrust in great things, these subtle false-coiners and stage-players:

—Until at last they are false towards themselves, squint-eyed, whited cankers, glossed over with strong words, parade virtues and brilliant false deeds.

Take good care there, you higher men! For nothing is more precious to me, and rarer, than honesty.

Is this today not that of the populace? The populace however knows not what is great and what is small, what is straight and what is honest: it is innocently crooked, it ever lies.

9.

Have a good distrust today you, higher men, you en-heartened ones! You open hearted ones! And keep your reasons secret! For this today is that of the populace.

What the populace once learned to believe without reasons, who could— refute it to them by means of reasons?

And on the marketplace one convinces with gestures. But reasons make the populace distrustful.

And when truth hath once triumphed there, then ask yourselves with good distrust: “What strong error hath fought for it?”

Be on your guard also against the learned! They hate you, because they are unproductive! They have cold, withered eyes before which every bird is un-plumed.

Such persons vaunt about not lying: but inability to lie is still far from being love to truth. Be on your guard!

Freedom from fever is still far from being knowledge! Refrigerated spirits I do not believe in. He who cannot lie, doth not know what truth is.

10.

If you would go up high, then use your own legs! Do not get yourselves CARRIED aloft; do not seat yourselves on other people’s backs and heads!

You have mounted, however, on horseback? You now ride briskly up to thy goal? Well, my friend! But your lame foot is also with your on horseback!

When you reach your goal, when you alight from your horse: precisely on your HEIGHT, you higher man,—then wilt thou stumble!

11.

You creating ones, you higher men! One is only pregnant with one’s own child.

Do not let yourselves be imposed upon or put upon! Who then is YOUR neighbour? Even if you act “for your neighbour”—you still do not create for him!

Unlearn, I pray you, this “for,” you creating ones: your very virtue wishes you to have naught to do with “for” and “on account of” and “because.” Against these false little words shall you stop your ears.

“For one’s neighbour,” is the virtue only of the petty people: there it is said “like and like,” and “hand washes hand”:—They have neither the right nor the power for YOUR self-seeking!

In your self-seeking, you creating ones, there is the foresight and foreseeing of the pregnant! What no one’s eye hath yet seen, namely, the fruit—this, shelters and saves and nourishes your entire love.

Where your entire love is, namely, with your child, there is also your entire virtue! Your work, your will is YOUR “neighbour”: let no false values impose upon you!

12.

Ye creating ones, ye higher men! Whoever hath to give birth is sick; whoever hath given birth, however, is unclean.

Ask women: one gives birth, not because it gives pleasure. The pain makes hens and poets cackle.

You creating ones, in you there is much uncleanliness. That is because you have had to be mothers.

A new child: oh, how much new filth hath also come into the world! Go apart! He who has given birth shall wash his soul!

13.

Be not virtuous beyond your powers! And seek nothing from yourselves opposed to probability!

Walk in the footsteps in which your fathers’ virtue hath already walked! How would you rise high, if your fathers’ will should not rise with you?

He, however, who would be a firstling, let him take care lest he also become a last one! And where the vices of your fathers are, there should you not set up as saints!

He whose fathers were inclined for women, and for strong wine and flesh of wild boar swine; what would it be if he demanded chastity of himself?

A folly would it be! Much, verily, doth it seem to me for such a one, if he should be the husband of one or of two or of three women.

And if he founded monasteries, and inscribed over their portals: “The way to holiness,”—I should still say: What good is it! It is a new folly!

He hath founded for himself a penance-house and refuge-house: much good may it do! But I do not believe in it.

In solitude there grows what any one brings into it—also the brute in one’s nature. Thus is solitude inadvisable unto many.

Has there ever been anything filthier on earth than the saints of the wilderness? AROUND THEM was not only the devil loose—but also the swine.

14.

Shy, ashamed, awkward, like the tiger whose spring hath failed—thus, you higher men, have I often seen you slink aside. A CAST which you made had failed.

But what does it matter, you dice players! You had not learned to play and mock, as one must play and mock! Do we not ever sit at a great table of mocking and playing?

And if great things have been a failure with you, have you yourselves therefore—been a failure? And if you yourselves have been a failure, has man therefore—been a failure? If man, however, has been a failure: well then! Never mind!

15.

The higher its type, always the seldomer does a thing succeed. You higher men here, have you not all—been failures?

Be of good cheer; what does it matter? How much is still possible! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as you ought to laugh!

What wonder even that you have failed and only half-succeeded, you half-shattered ones! Doth not—man’s FUTURE strive and struggle in you?

Man’s furthest, profoundest, star-highest issues, his prodigious powers—do not all these foam through one another in your vessel?

What wonder that many a vessel shatters! Learn to laugh at yourselves, as you ought to laugh! You higher men, O, how much is still possible!

And verily, how much hath already succeeded! How rich is this earth in small, good, perfect things, in well-constituted things!

Set around you small, good, perfect things, you higher men. Their golden maturity heals the heart. The perfect teaches one to hope.

16.

What hath hitherto been the greatest sin here on earth? Was it not the word of him who said: “Woe unto them that laugh now!”

Did he himself find no cause for laughter on the earth? Then he sought badly. A child even finds cause for it.

He—did not love sufficiently: otherwise would he also have loved us, the laughing ones! But he hated and hooted us; wailing and teeth-gnashing did he promise us.

Must one then curse immediately, when one doth not love? That—seems to me bad taste. Thus did he, however, this absolute one. He sprang from the populace.

And he himself just did not love sufficiently; otherwise would he have raged less because people did not love him. All great love doth not SEEK love:—it seeks more.

Go out of the way of all such absolute ones! They are a poor sickly type, a populace-type: they look at this life with ill-will, they have an evil eye for this earth.

Go out of the way of all such absolute ones! They have heavy feet and sultry hearts:—they do not know how to dance. How could the earth be light to such ones!

17.

Tortuously do all good things come nigh to their goal. Like cats they curve their backs, they purr inwardly with their approaching happiness,—all good things laugh.

His step betrays whether a person already walks on HIS OWN path: just see me walk! He, however, who cometh nigh to his goal, dances.

And verily, a statue have I not become, not yet do I stand there stiff, stupid and stony, like a pillar; I love fast racing.

And though there be on earth fens and dense afflictions, he who hath light feet runs even across the mud, and dances, as upon well-swept ice.

Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do not forget your legs! Lift up also your legs, you good dancers, and better still, if you stand upon your heads!

18.

This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown: I myself have put on this crown, I myself have consecrated my laughter. No one else have I found to-day potent enough for this.

Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light one, who beckons with his pinions, one ready for flight, beckoning unto all birds, ready and prepared, a blissfully light-spirited one:—

Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the sooth-laugher, no impatient one, no absolute one, one who loves leaps and side-leaps; I myself have put on this crown!

19.

Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do not forget your legs! Lift up also your legs, you good dancers, and better still if you stand upon your heads!

There are also heavy animals in a state of happiness, there are club footed ones from the beginning. Curiously do they exert themselves, like an elephant which endeavours to stand upon its head.

Better, however, to be foolish with happiness than foolish with misfortune, better to dance awkwardly than walk lamely. So learn, I pray you, my wisdom, you higher men: even the worst thing hath two good reverse sides,—

—Even the worst thing hath good dancing-legs: so learn, I pray you, you higher men, to put yourselves on your proper legs!

So unlearn, I pray you, the sorrow sighing, and all the populace-sadness! Oh, how sad the buffoons of the populace seem to me today! This today, however, is that of the populace.

20.

Do like unto the wind when it rushes forth from its mountain-caves: unto its own piping will it dance; the seas tremble and leap under its footsteps.

That which gives wings to asses, that which milks the lionesses:— praised be that good, unruly spirit, which cometh like a hurricane unto all the present and unto all the populace,—

—Which is hostile to thistle-heads and puzzle-heads, and to all withered leaves and weeds:—praised be this wild, good, free spirit of the storm, which dances upon fens and afflictions, as upon meadows!

Which hates the consumptive populace dogs, and all the ill-constituted, sullen brood:—praised be this spirit of all free spirits, the laughing storm, which blows dust into the eyes of all the melanopic and melancholic!

You higher men, the worst thing in you is that you have none of you learned to dance as you ought to dance—to dance beyond yourselves! What doth it matter that you have failed!

How many things are still possible! So LEARN to laugh beyond yourselves! Lift up your hearts, you good dancers, high! Higher! And do not forget the good laughter!

This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown: to you my brethren do I cast this crown! Laughing have I consecrated; you higher men, LEARN, I pray you—to laugh!

EMMA GOLDMAN

Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was born in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire.  She was 15 years old when she and her sister travelled to the United States.  Goldman started to work in a factory and became quickly disillusioned with the working conditions of workers.  Goldman questioned the daily living conditions of workers.  She naturalized and became a U.S. citizen.  Goldman became involved with the Anarchist Movement in the United States.  She was arrested a few times, and eventually, she was deported back to Russia in 1919.  She was one of the defendants in the landmark court case Abrams v. United States (1919).  She traveled and gave speeches about injustice, inequality, and exploitation.  Eventually, she married in England and gained English citizenship.  In part because of her experience with prisons in the United States, she made prison reform one of her key issues to work on.  Important events during her time that influenced Goldman were the violent affair of the Haymarket in Chicago 1886 (even though she died in Canada she is buried in Chicago), the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, World War I (1814-1818), the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and World War II (1939-1945).  Some of the issues that motivated Goldman to ‘fight the good fight’: workers’ rights, sexual freedom, and birth control.  For Goldman, independence of women did not include the right to vote.  Her writing represented some of the issues above mentioned; My Disillusionment With Russia, Living My Life, and Anarchism and Other Essays.

Anarchism and Other Essays

ANARCHISM: WHAT IT REALLY STANDS FOR

ANARCHY.

Ever reviled, accursed, ne’er understood,
Thou art the grisly terror of our age.
“Wreck of all order,” cry the multitude,
“Art thou, and war and murder’s endless rage.”
O, let them cry. To them that ne’er have striven
The truth that lies behind a word to find,
To them the word’s right meaning was not given.
They shall continue blind among the blind.
But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure,
Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.
I give thee to the future! Thine secure
When each at least unto himself shall waken.
Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest’s thrill?
I cannot tell—but it the earth shall see!
I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will
Not rule, and also ruled I will not be!

JOHN HENRY MACKAY.

The history of human growth and development is at the same time the history of the terrible struggle of every new idea heralding the approach of a brighter dawn. In its tenacious hold on tradition, the Old has never hesitated to make use of the foulest and cruelest means to stay the advent of the New, in whatever form or period the latter may have asserted itself. Nor need we retrace our steps into the distant past to realize the enormity of opposition, difficulties, and hardships placed in the path of every progressive idea. The rack, the thumbscrew, and the knout are still with us; so are the convict’s garb and the social wrath, all conspiring against the spirit that is serenely marching on.

Anarchism could not hope to escape the fate of all other ideas of innovation. Indeed, as the most revolutionary and uncompromising innovator, Anarchism must needs meet with the combined ignorance and venom of the world it aims to reconstruct.

To deal even remotely with all that is being said and done against Anarchism would necessitate the writing of a whole volume. I shall therefore meet only two of the principal objections. In so doing, I shall attempt to elucidate what Anarchism really stands for.

The strange phenomenon of the opposition to Anarchism is that it brings to light the relation between so-called intelligence and ignorance. And yet this is not so very strange when we consider the relativity of all things. The ignorant mass has in its favor that it makes no pretense of knowledge or tolerance. Acting, as it always does, by mere impulse, its reasons are like those of a child. “Why?” “Because.” Yet the opposition of the uneducated to Anarchism deserves the same consideration as that of the intelligent man.

What, then, are the objections? First, Anarchism is impractical, though a beautiful ideal. Second, Anarchism stands for violence and destruction, hence it must be repudiated as vile and dangerous. Both the intelligent man and the ignorant mass judge not from a thorough knowledge of the subject, but either from hearsay or false interpretation.

A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The true criterion of the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong or foolish; rather is it whether the scheme has vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well as sustain, new life. In the light of this conception, Anarchism is indeed practical. More than any other idea, it is helping to do away with the wrong and foolish; more than any other idea, it is building and sustaining new life.

The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism. Not a thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents. Therefore Anarchism represents to the unthinking what the proverbial bad man does to the child,—a black monster bent on swallowing everything; in short, destruction and violence.

Destruction and violence! How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating? Nor is he aware that Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature’s forces, destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life’s essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit.

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. The widespread mental indolence, so prevalent in society, proves this to be only too true. Rather than to go to the bottom of any given idea, to examine into its origin and meaning, most people will either condemn it altogether, or rely on some superficial or prejudicial definition of non-essentials.

Anarchism urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition; but that the brain capacity of the average reader be not taxed too much, I also shall begin with a definition, and then elaborate on the latter.

ANARCHISM:—The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.

The new social order rests, of course, on the materialistic basis of life; but while all Anarchists agree that the main evil today is an economic one, they maintain that the solution of that evil can be brought about only through the consideration of EVERY PHASE of life,—individual, as well as the collective; the internal, as well as the external phases.

A thorough perusal of the history of human development will disclose two elements in bitter conflict with each other; elements that are only now beginning to be understood, not as foreign to each other, but as closely related and truly harmonious, if only placed in proper environment: the individual and social instincts. The individual and society have waged a relentless and bloody battle for ages, each striving for supremacy, because each was blind to the value and importance of the other. The individual and social instincts,—the one a most potent factor for individual endeavor, for growth, aspiration, self-realization; the other an equally potent factor for mutual helpfulness and social well-being.

The explanation of the storm raging within the individual, and between him and his surroundings, is not far to seek. The primitive man, unable to understand his being, much less the unity of all life, felt himself absolutely dependent on blind, hidden forces ever ready to mock and taunt him. Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the LEIT-MOTIF of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society. Again and again the same motif, MAN IS NOTHING, THE POWERS ARE EVERYTHING. Thus Jehovah would only endure man on condition of complete surrender. Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself. The State, society, and moral laws all sing the same refrain: Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself.

Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man’s subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man. There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of a precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong. The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are distributing the element to keep the life essence—that is, the individual—pure and strong.

“The one thing of value in the world,” says Emerson, “is the active soul; this every man contains within him. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth and creates.” In other words, the individual instinct is the thing of value in the world. It is the true soul that sees and creates the truth alive, out of which is to come a still greater truth, the re-born social soul.

Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. To accomplish that unity, Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society.

Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man’s enslavement and all the horrors it entails. Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began. Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress.

Property, the dominion of man’s needs, the denial of the right to satisfy his needs. Time was when property claimed a divine right, when it came to man with the same refrain, even as religion, “Sacrifice! Abnegate! Submit!” The spirit of Anarchism has lifted man from his prostrate position. He now stands erect, with his face toward the light. He has learned to see the insatiable, devouring, devastating nature of property, and he is preparing to strike the monster dead.

“Property is robbery,” said the great French Anarchist, Proudhon. Yes, but without risk and danger to the robber. Monopolizing the accumulated efforts of man, property has robbed him of his birthright, and has turned him loose a pauper and an outcast. Property has not even the time-worn excuse that man does not create enough to satisfy all needs. The A B C student of economics knows that the productivity of labor within the last few decades far exceeds normal demand a hundredfold. But what are normal demands to an abnormal institution? The only demand that property recognizes is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade. America is particularly boastful of her great power, her enormous national wealth. Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soilless army of human prey.

It is generally conceded that unless the returns of any business venture exceed the cost, bankruptcy is inevitable. But those engaged in the business of producing wealth have not yet learned even this simple lesson. Every year the cost of production in human life is growing larger (50,000 killed, 100,000 wounded in America last year); the returns to the masses, who help to create wealth, are ever getting smaller. Yet America continues to be blind to the inevitable bankruptcy of our business of production. Nor is this the only crime of the latter. Still more fatal is the crime of turning the producer into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron. Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is making.

Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,—too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.

Anarchism cannot but repudiate such a method of production: its goal is the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of the individual. Oscar Wilde defines a perfect personality as “one who develops under perfect conditions, who is not wounded, maimed, or in danger.” A perfect personality, then, is only possible in a state of society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions of work, and the freedom to work. One to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist,—the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force. That being the ideal of Anarchism, its economic arrangements must consist of voluntary productive and distributive associations, gradually developing into free communism, as the best means of producing with the least waste of human energy. Anarchism, however, also recognizes the right of the individual, or numbers of individuals, to arrange at all times for other forms of work, in harmony with their tastes and desires.

Such free display of human energy being possible only under complete individual and social freedom, Anarchism directs its forces against the third and greatest foe of all social equality; namely, the State, organized authority, or statutory law,—the dominion of human conduct.

Just as religion has fettered the human mind, and as property, or the monopoly of things, has subdued and stifled man’s needs, so has the State enslaved his spirit, dictating every phase of conduct. “All government in essence,” says Emerson, “is tyranny.” It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual.

Referring to the American government, the greatest American Anarchist, David Thoreau, said: “Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instance losing its integrity; it has not the vitality and force of a single living man. Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice.”

Indeed, the keynote of government is injustice. With the arrogance and self-sufficiency of the King who could do no wrong, governments ordain, judge, condemn, and punish the most insignificant offenses, while maintaining themselves by the greatest of all offenses, the annihilation of individual liberty. Thus Ouida is right when she maintains that “the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls.”

Yet even a flock of sheep would resist the chicanery of the State, if it were not for the corruptive, tyrannical, and oppressive methods it employs to serve its purposes. Therefore Bakunin repudiates the State as synonymous with the surrender of the liberty of the individual or small minorities,—the destruction of social relationship, the curtailment, or complete denial even, of life itself, for its own aggrandizement. The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.

In fact, there is hardly a modern thinker who does not agree that government, organized authority, or the State, is necessary ONLY to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only.

Even George Bernard Shaw, who hopes for the miraculous from the State under Fabianism, nevertheless admits that “it is at present a huge machine for robbing and slave-driving of the poor by brute force.” This being the case, it is hard to see why the clever prefacer wishes to uphold the State after poverty shall have ceased to exist.

Unfortunately there are still a number of people who continue in the fatal belief that government rests on natural laws, that it maintains social order and harmony, that it diminishes crime, and that it prevents the lazy man from fleecing his fellows. I shall therefore examine these contentions.

A natural law is that factor in man which asserts itself freely and spontaneously without any external force, in harmony with the requirements of nature. For instance, the demand for nutrition, for sex gratification, for light, air, and exercise, is a natural law. But its expression needs not the machinery of government, needs not the club, the gun, the handcuff, or the prison. To obey such laws, if we may call it obedience, requires only spontaneity and free opportunity. That governments do not maintain themselves through such harmonious factors is proven by the terrible array of violence, force, and coercion all governments use in order to live. Thus Blackstone is right when he says, “Human laws are invalid, because they are contrary to the laws of nature.”

Unless it be the order of Warsaw after the slaughter of thousands of people, it is difficult to ascribe to governments any capacity for order or social harmony. Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only “order” that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth. The only way organized authority meets this grave situation is by extending still greater privileges to those who have already monopolized the earth, and by still further enslaving the disinherited masses. Thus the entire arsenal of government—laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons,—is strenuously engaged in “harmonizing” the most antagonistic elements in society.

The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime. What does society, as it exists today, know of the process of despair, the poverty, the horrors, the fearful struggle the human soul must pass on its way to crime and degradation. Who that knows this terrible process can fail to see the truth in these words of Peter Kropotkin:

“Those who will hold the balance between the benefits thus attributed to law and punishment and the degrading effect of the latter on humanity; those who will estimate the torrent of depravity poured abroad in human society by the informer, favored by the Judge even, and paid for in clinking cash by governments, under the pretext of aiding to unmask crime; those who will go within prison walls and there see what human beings become when deprived of liberty, when subjected to the care of brutal keepers, to coarse, cruel words, to a thousand stinging, piercing humiliations, will agree with us that the entire apparatus of prison and punishment is an abomination which ought to be brought to an end.”

The deterrent influence of law on the lazy man is too absurd to merit consideration. If society were only relieved of the waste and expense of keeping a lazy class, and the equally great expense of the paraphernalia of protection this lazy class requires, the social tables would contain an abundance for all, including even the occasional lazy individual. Besides, it is well to consider that laziness results either from special privileges, or physical and mental abnormalities. Our present insane system of production fosters both, and the most astounding phenomenon is that people should want to work at all now. Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope.

To achieve such an arrangement of life, government, with its unjust, arbitrary, repressive measures, must be done away with. At best it has but imposed one single mode of life upon all, without regard to individual and social variations and needs. In destroying government and statutory laws, Anarchism proposes to rescue the self-respect and independence of the individual from all restraint and invasion by authority. Only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him. Only in freedom will he realize the true force of the social bonds which knit men together, and which are the true foundation of a normal social life.

But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism?

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?

John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities.

Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

This is not a wild fancy or an aberration of the mind. It is the conclusion arrived at by hosts of intellectual men and women the world over; a conclusion resulting from the close and studious observation of the tendencies of modern society: individual liberty and economic equality, the twin forces for the birth of what is fine and true in man.

As to methods. Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future to be realized through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual. The serene, calm character of a Tolstoy will wish different methods for social reconstruction than the intense, overflowing personality of a Michael Bakunin or a Peter Kropotkin. Equally so it must be apparent that the economic and political needs of Russia will dictate more drastic measures than would England or America. Anarchism does not stand for military drill and uniformity; it does, however, stand for the spirit of revolt, in whatever form, against everything that hinders human growth. All Anarchists agree in that, as they also agree in their opposition to the political machinery as a means of bringing about the great social change.

“All voting,” says Thoreau, “is a sort of gaming, like checkers, or backgammon, a playing with right and wrong; its obligation never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right thing is doing nothing for it. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.” A close examination of the machinery of politics and its achievements will bear out the logic of Thoreau.

What does the history of parliamentarism show? Nothing but failure and defeat, not even a single reform to ameliorate the economic and social stress of the people. Laws have been passed and enactments made for the improvement and protection of labor. Thus it was proven only last year that Illinois, with the most rigid laws for mine protection, had the greatest mine disasters. In States where child labor laws prevail, child exploitation is at its highest, and though with us the workers enjoy full political opportunities, capitalism has reached the most brazen zenith.

Even were the workers able to have their own representatives, for which our good Socialist politicians are clamoring, what chances are there for their honesty and good faith? One has but to bear in mind the process of politics to realize that its path of good intentions is full of pitfalls: wire-pulling, intriguing, flattering, lying, cheating; in fact, chicanery of every description, whereby the political aspirant can achieve success. Added to that is a complete demoralization of character and conviction, until nothing is left that would make one hope for anything from such a human derelict. Time and time again the people were foolish enough to trust, believe, and support with their last farthing aspiring politicians, only to find themselves betrayed and cheated.

It may be claimed that men of integrity would not become corrupt in the political grinding mill. Perhaps not; but such men would be absolutely helpless to exert the slightest influence in behalf of labor, as indeed has been shown in numerous instances. The State is the economic master of its servants. Good men, if such there be, would either remain true to their political faith and lose their economic support, or they would cling to their economic master and be utterly unable to do the slightest good. The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.

The political superstition is still holding sway over the hearts and minds of the masses, but the true lovers of liberty will have no more to do with it. Instead, they believe with Stirner that man has as much liberty as he is willing to take. Anarchism therefore stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein lies the salvation of man. Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage. In short, it calls for free, independent spirits, for “men who are men, and who have a bone in their backs which you cannot pass your hand through.”

Universal suffrage itself owes its existence to direct action. If not for the spirit of rebellion, of the defiance on the part of the American revolutionary fathers, their posterity would still wear the King’s coat. If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man. True, the trade in white flesh is still going on; but that, too, will have to be abolished by direct action. Trade-unionism, the economic arena of the modern gladiator, owes its existence to direct action. It is but recently that law and government have attempted to crush the trade-union movement, and condemned the exponents of man’s right to organize to prison as conspirators. Had they sought to assert their cause through begging, pleading, and compromise, trade-unionism would today be a negligible quantity. In France, in Spain, in Italy, in Russia, nay even in England (witness the growing rebellion of English labor unions) direct, revolutionary, economic action has become so strong a force in the battle for industrial liberty as to make the world realize the tremendous importance of labor’s power. The General Strike, the supreme expression of the economic consciousness of the workers, was ridiculed in America but a short time ago. Today every great strike, in order to win, must realize the importance of the solidaric general protest.

Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.

Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social change has ever come about without a revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is but thought carried into action.

Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every phase of human endeavor. Science, art, literature, the drama, the effort for economic betterment, in fact every individual and social opposition to the existing disorder of things, is illumined by the spiritual light of Anarchism. It is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn.

PATRIOTISM: A MENACE TO LIBERTY

What is patriotism? Is it love of one’s birthplace, the place of childhood’s recollections and hopes, dreams and aspirations? Is it the place where, in childlike naivety, we would watch the fleeting clouds, and wonder why we, too, could not run so swiftly? The place where we would count the milliard glittering stars, terror-stricken lest each one “an eye should be,” piercing the very depths of our little souls? Is it the place where we would listen to the music of the birds, and long to have wings to fly, even as they, to distant lands? Or the place where we would sit at mother’s knee, enraptured by wonderful tales of great deeds and conquests? In short, is it love for the spot, every inch representing dear and precious recollections of a happy, joyous, and playful childhood?

If that were patriotism, few American men of today could be called upon to be patriotic, since the place of play has been turned into factory, mill, and mine, while deafening sounds of machinery have replaced the music of the birds. Nor can we longer hear the tales of great deeds, for the stories our mothers tell today are but those of sorrow, tears, and grief.

What, then, is patriotism? “Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels,” said Dr. Johnson. Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our times, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average workingman.

Gustave Herve, another great anti-patriot, justly calls patriotism a superstition—one far more injurious, brutal, and inhumane than religion. The superstition of religion originated in man’s inability to explain natural phenomena. That is, when primitive man heard thunder or saw the lightning, he could not account for either, and therefore concluded that back of them must be a force greater than himself. Similarly he saw a supernatural force in the rain, and in the various other changes in nature. Patriotism, on the other hand, is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.

Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.

The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that, from early infancy, the mind of the child is poisoned with blood-curdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc. When the child has reached manhood, he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend HIS country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition. It is for that purpose that America has within a short time spent four hundred million dollars. Just think of it—four hundred million dollars taken from the produce of the PEOPLE. For surely it is not the rich who contribute to patriotism. They are cosmopolitans, perfectly at home in every land. We in America know well the truth of this. Are not our rich Americans Frenchmen in France, Germans in Germany, or Englishmen in England? And do they not squander with cosmopolitan grace fortunes coined by American factory children and cotton slaves? Yes, theirs is the patriotism that will make it possible to send messages of condolence to a despot like the Russian Tsar, when any mishap befalls him, as President Roosevelt did in the name of HIS people, when Sergius was punished by the Russian revolutionists.

It is a patriotism that will assist the arch-murderer, Diaz, in destroying thousands of lives in Mexico, or that will even aid in arresting Mexican revolutionists on American soil and keep them incarcerated in American prisons, without the slightest cause or reason.

But, then, patriotism is not for those who represent wealth and power. It is good enough for the people. It reminds one of the historic wisdom of Frederic the Great, the bosom friend of Voltaire, who said: “Religion is a fraud, but it must be maintained for the masses.”

That patriotism is rather a costly institution, no one will doubt after considering the following statistics. The progressive increase of the expenditures for the leading armies and navies of the world during the last quarter of a century is a fact of such gravity as to startle every thoughtful student of economic problems. It may be briefly indicated by dividing the time from 1881 to 1905 into five-year periods, and noting the disbursements of several great nations for army and navy purposes during the first and last of those periods. From the first to the last of the periods noted the expenditures of Great Britain increased from $2,101,848,936 to $4,143,226,885, those of France from $3,324,500,000 to $3,455,109,900, those of Germany from $725,000,200 to $2,700,375,600, those of the United States from $1,275,500,750 to $2,650,900,450, those of Russia from $1,900,975,500 to $5,250,445,100, those of Italy from $1,600,975,750 to $1,755,500,100, and those of Japan from $182,900,500 to $700,925,475.

The military expenditures of each of the nations mentioned increased in each of the five-year periods under review. During the entire interval from 1881 to 1905 Great Britain’s outlay for her army increased fourfold, that of the United States was tripled, Russia’s was doubled, that of Germany increased 35 per cent., that of France about 15 per cent., and that of Japan nearly 500 per cent. If we compare the expenditures of these nations upon their armies with their total expenditures for all the twenty-five years ending with 1905, the proportion rose as follows:

In Great Britain from 20 per cent. to 37; in the United States from 15 to 23; in France from 16 to 18; in Italy from 12 to 15; in Japan from 12 to 14. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that the proportion in Germany decreased from about 58 per cent. to 25, the decrease being due to the enormous increase in the imperial expenditures for other purposes, the fact being that the army expenditures for the period of 1901-5 were higher than for any five-year period preceding. Statistics show that the countries in which army expenditures are greatest, in proportion to the total national revenues, are Great Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy, in the order named.

The showing as to the cost of great navies is equally impressive. During the twenty-five years ending with 1905 naval expenditures increased approximately as follows: Great Britain, 300 per cent.; France 60 per cent.; Germany 600 per cent.; the United States 525 per cent.; Russia 300 per cent.; Italy 250 per cent.; and Japan, 700 per cent. With the exception of Great Britain, the United States spends more for naval purposes than any other nation, and this expenditure bears also a larger proportion to the entire national disbursements than that of any other power. In the period 1881-5, the expenditure for the United States navy was $6.20 out of each $100 appropriated for all national purposes; the amount rose to $6.60 for the next five-year period, to $8.10 for the next, to $11.70 for the next, and to $16.40 for 1901-5. It is morally certain that the outlay for the current period of five years will show a still further increase.

The rising cost of militarism may be still further illustrated by computing it as a per capita tax on population. From the first to the last of the five-year periods taken as the basis for the comparisons here given, it has risen as follows: In Great Britain, from $18.47 to $52.50; in France, from $19.66 to $23.62; in Germany, from $10.17 to $15.51; in the United States, from $5.62 to $13.64; in Russia, from $6.14 to $8.37; in Italy, from $9.59 to $11.24, and in Japan from 86 cents to $3.11.

It is in connection with this rough estimate of cost per capita that the economic burden of militarism is most appreciable. The irresistible conclusion from available data is that the increase of expenditure for army and navy purposes is rapidly surpassing the growth of population in each of the countries considered in the present calculation. In other words, a continuation of the increased demands of militarism threatens each of those nations with a progressive exhaustion both of men and resources.

The awful waste that patriotism necessitates ought to be sufficient to cure the man of even average intelligence from this disease. Yet patriotism demands still more. The people are urged to be patriotic and for that luxury they pay, not only by supporting their “defenders,” but even by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegiance to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister.

The usual contention is that we need a standing army to protect the country from foreign invasion. Every intelligent man and woman knows, however, that this is a myth maintained to frighten and coerce the foolish. The governments of the world, knowing each other’s interests, do not invade each other. They have learned that they can gain much more by international arbitration of disputes than by war and conquest. Indeed, as Carlyle said, “War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village; stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.”

It does not require much wisdom to trace every war back to a similar cause. Let us take our own Spanish-American war, supposedly a great and patriotic event in the history of the United States. How our hearts burned with indignation against the atrocious Spaniards! True, our indignation did not flare up spontaneously. It was nurtured by months of newspaper agitation, and long after Butcher Weyler had killed off many noble Cubans and outraged many Cuban women. Still, in justice to the American Nation be it said, it did grow indignant and was willing to fight, and that it fought bravely. But when the smoke was over, the dead buried, and the cost of the war came back to the people in an increase in the price of commodities and rent—that is, when we sobered up from our patriotic spree—it suddenly dawned on us that the cause of the Spanish-American war was the consideration of the price of sugar; or, to be more explicit, that the lives, blood, and money of the American people were used to protect the interests of American capitalists, which were threatened by the Spanish government. That this is not an exaggeration, but is based on absolute facts and figures, is best proven by the attitude of the American government to Cuban labor. When Cuba was firmly in the clutches of the United States, the very soldiers sent to liberate Cuba were ordered to shoot Cuban workingmen during the great cigarmakers’ strike, which took place shortly after the war.

Nor do we stand alone in waging war for such causes. The curtain is beginning to be lifted on the motives of the terrible Russo-Japanese war, which cost so much blood and tears. And we see again that back of the fierce Moloch of war stands the still fiercer god of Commercialism. Kuropatkin, the Russian Minister of War during the Russo-Japanese struggle, has revealed the true secret behind the latter. The Tsar and his Grand Dukes, having invested money in Corean concessions, the war was forced for the sole purpose of speedily accumulating large fortunes.

The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed. The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained.

However, the clamor for an increased army and navy is not due to any foreign danger. It is owing to the dread of the growing discontent of the masses and of the international spirit among the workers. It is to meet the internal enemy that the Powers of various countries are preparing themselves; an enemy, who, once awakened to consciousness, will prove more dangerous than any foreign invader.

The powers that have for centuries been engaged in enslaving the masses have made a thorough study of their psychology. They know that the people at large are like children whose despair, sorrow, and tears can be turned into joy with a little toy. And the more gorgeously the toy is dressed, the louder the colors, the more it will appeal to the million-headed child.

An army and navy represents the people’s toys. To make them more attractive and acceptable, hundreds and thousands of dollars are being spent for the display of these toys. That was the purpose of the American government in equipping a fleet and sending it along the Pacific coast, that every American citizen should be made to feel the pride and glory of the United States. The city of San Francisco spent one hundred thousand dollars for the entertainment of the fleet; Los Angeles, sixty thousand; Seattle and Tacoma, about one hundred thousand. To entertain the fleet, did I say? To dine and wine a few superior officers, while the “brave boys” had to mutiny to get sufficient food. Yes, two hundred and sixty thousand dollars were spent on fireworks, theatre parties, and revelries, at a time when men, women, and children through the breadth and length of the country were starving in the streets; when thousands of unemployed were ready to sell their labor at any price.

Two hundred and sixty thousand dollars! What could not have been accomplished with such an enormous sum? But instead of bread and shelter, the children of those cities were taken to see the fleet, that it may remain, as one of the newspapers said, “a lasting memory for the child.”

A wonderful thing to remember, is it not? The implements of civilized slaughter. If the mind of the child is to be poisoned with such memories, what hope is there for a true realization of human brotherhood?

We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.

Such is the logic of patriotism.

Considering the evil results that patriotism is fraught with for the average man, it is as nothing compared with the insult and injury that patriotism heaps upon the soldier himself,—that poor, deluded victim of superstition and ignorance. He, the savior of his country, the protector of his nation,—what has patriotism in store for him? A life of slavish submission, vice, and perversion, during peace; a life of danger, exposure, and death, during war.

While on a recent lecture tour in San Francisco, I visited the Presidio, the most beautiful spot overlooking the Bay and Golden Gate Park. Its purpose should have been playgrounds for children, gardens and music for the recreation of the weary. Instead it is made ugly, dull, and gray by barracks,—barracks wherein the rich would not allow their dogs to dwell. In these miserable shanties soldiers are herded like cattle; here they waste their young days, polishing the boots and brass buttons of their superior officers. Here, too, I saw the distinction of classes: sturdy sons of a free Republic, drawn up in line like convicts, saluting every passing shrimp of a lieutenant. American equality, degrading manhood and elevating the uniform!

Barrack life further tends to develop tendencies of sexual perversion. It is gradually producing along this line results similar to European military conditions. Havelock Ellis, the noted writer on sex psychology, has made a thorough study of the subject. I quote: “Some of the barracks are great centers of male prostitution…. The number of soldiers who prostitute themselves is greater than we are willing to believe. It is no exaggeration to say that in certain regiments the presumption is in favor of the venality of the majority of the men…. On summer evenings Hyde Park and the neighborhood of Albert Gate are full of guardsmen and others plying a lively trade, and with little disguise, in uniform or out…. In most cases the proceeds form a comfortable addition to Tommy Atkins’ pocket money.”

To what extent this perversion has eaten its way into the army and navy can best be judged from the fact that special houses exist for this form of prostitution. The practice is not limited to England; it is universal. “Soldiers are no less sought after in France than in England or in Germany, and special houses for military prostitution exist both in Paris and the garrison towns.”

Had Mr. Havelock Ellis included America in his investigation of sex perversion, he would have found that the same conditions prevail in our army and navy as in those of other countries. The growth of the standing army inevitably adds to the spread of sex perversion; the barracks are the incubators.

Aside from the sexual effects of barrack life, it also tends to unfit the soldier for useful labor after leaving the army. Men, skilled in a trade, seldom enter the army or navy, but even they, after a military experience, find themselves totally unfitted for their former occupations. Having acquired habits of idleness and a taste for excitement and adventure, no peaceful pursuit can content them. Released from the army, they can turn to no useful work. But it is usually the social riff-raff, discharged prisoners and the like, whom either the struggle for life or their own inclination drives into the ranks. These, their military term over, again turn to their former life of crime, more brutalized and degraded than before. It is a well-known fact that in our prisons there is a goodly number of ex-soldiers; while on the other hand, the army and navy are to a great extent supplied with ex-convicts.

Of all the evil results, I have just described, none seems to me so detrimental to human integrity as the spirit patriotism has produced in the case of Private William Buwalda. Because he foolishly believed that one can be a soldier and exercise his rights as a man at the same time, the military authorities punished him severely. True, he had served his country fifteen years, during which time his record was unimpeachable. According to Gen. Funston, who reduced Buwalda’s sentence to three years, “the first duty of an officer or an enlisted man is unquestioned obedience and loyalty to the government, and it makes no difference whether he approves of that government or not.” Thus Funston stamps the true character of allegiance. According to him, entrance into the army abrogates the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!

In justification of this most outrageous sentence of Buwalda, Gen. Funston tells the American people that the soldier’s action was a “serious crime equal to treason.” Now, what did this “terrible crime” really consist of? Simply in this: William Buwalda was one of fifteen hundred people who attended a public meeting in San Francisco; and, oh, horrors, he shook hands with the speaker, Emma Goldman. A terrible crime, indeed, which the General calls “a great military offense, infinitely worse than desertion.”

Can there be a greater indictment against patriotism than that it will thus brand a man a criminal, throw him into prison, and rob him of the results of fifteen years of faithful service?

Buwalda gave to his country the best years of his life and his very manhood. But all that was as nothing. Patriotism is inexorable and, like all insatiable monsters, demands all or nothing. It does not admit that a soldier is also a human being, who has a right to his own feelings and opinions, his own inclinations and ideas. No, patriotism can not admit of that. That is the lesson which Buwalda was made to learn; made to learn at a rather costly, though not at a useless, price. When he returned to freedom, he had lost his position in the army, but he regained his self-respect. After all, that is worth three years of imprisonment.

A writer on the military conditions of America, in a recent article, commented on the power of the military man over the civilian in Germany. He said, among other things, that if our Republic had no other meaning than to guarantee all citizens equal rights, it would have just cause for existence. I am convinced that the writer was not in Colorado during the patriotic regime of General Bell. He probably would have changed his mind had he seen how, in the name of patriotism and the Republic, men were thrown into bull-pens, dragged about, driven across the border, and subjected to all kinds of indignities. Nor is that Colorado incident the only one in the growth of military power in the United States. There is hardly a strike where troops and militia do not come to the rescue of those in power, and where they do not act as arrogantly and brutally as do the men wearing the Kaiser’s uniform. Then, too, we have the Dick military law. Had the writer forgotten that?

A great misfortune with most of our writers is that they are absolutely ignorant on current events, or that, lacking honesty, they will not speak of these matters. And so it has come to pass that the Dick military law was rushed through Congress with little discussion and still less publicity,—a law which gives the President the power to turn a peaceful citizen into a bloodthirsty man-killer, supposedly for the defense of the country, in reality for the protection of the interests of that particular party whose mouthpiece the President happens to be.

Our writer claims that militarism can never become such a power in America as abroad, since it is voluntary with us, while compulsory in the Old World. Two very important facts, however, the gentleman forgets to consider. First, that conscription has created in Europe a deep-seated hatred of militarism among all classes of society. Thousands of young recruits enlist under protest and, once in the army, they will use every possible means to desert. Second, that it is the compulsory feature of militarism which has created a tremendous anti-militarist movement, feared by European Powers far more than anything else. After all, the greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism. The very moment the latter is undermined, capitalism will totter. True, we have no conscription; that is, men are not usually forced to enlist in the army, but we have developed a far more exacting and rigid force—necessity. Is it not a fact that during industrial depressions there is a tremendous increase in the number of enlistments? The trade of militarism may not be either lucrative or honorable, but it is better than tramping the country in search of work, standing in the bread line, or sleeping in municipal lodging houses. After all, it means thirteen dollars per month, three meals a day, and a place to sleep. Yet even necessity is not sufficiently strong a factor to bring into the army an element of character and manhood. No wonder our military authorities complain of the “poor material” enlisting in the army and navy. This admission is a very encouraging sign. It proves that there is still enough of the spirit of independence and love of liberty left in the average American to risk starvation rather than don the uniform.

Thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time. The centralization of power has brought into being an international feeling of solidarity among the oppressed nations of the world; a solidarity which represents a greater harmony of interests between the workingman of America and his brothers abroad than between the American miner and his exploiting compatriot; a solidarity which fears not foreign invasion, because it is bringing all the workers to the point when they will say to their masters, “Go and do your own killing. We have done it long enough for you.”

This solidarity is awakening the consciousness of even the soldiers, they, too, being flesh of the flesh of the great human family. A solidarity that has proven infallible more than once during past struggles, and which has been the impetus inducing the Parisian soldiers, during the Commune of 1871, to refuse to obey when ordered to shoot their brothers. It has given courage to the men who mutinied on Russian warships during recent years. It will eventually bring about the uprising of all the oppressed and downtrodden against their international exploiters.

The proletariat of Europe has realized the great force of that solidarity and has, as a result, inaugurated a war against patriotism and its bloody spectre, militarism. Thousands of men fill the prisons of France, Germany, Russia, and the Scandinavian countries, because they dared to defy the ancient superstition. Nor is the movement limited to the working class; it has embraced representatives in all stations of life, its chief exponents being men and women prominent in art, science, and letters.

America will have to follow suit. The spirit of militarism has already permeated all walks of life. Indeed, I am convinced that militarism is growing a greater danger here than anywhere else, because of the many bribes capitalism holds out to those whom it wishes to destroy.

The beginning has already been made in the schools. Evidently the government holds to the Jesuitical conception, “Give me the child mind, and I will mould the man.” Children are trained in military tactics, the glory of military achievements extolled in the curriculum, and the youthful minds perverted to suit the government. Further, the youth of the country is appealed to in glaring posters to join the army and navy. “A fine chance to see the world!” cries the governmental huckster. Thus innocent boys are morally shanghaied into patriotism, and the military Moloch strides conquering through the Nation.

The American workingman has suffered so much at the hands of the soldier, State, and Federal, that he is quite justified in his disgust with, and his opposition to, the uniformed parasite. However, mere denunciation will not solve this great problem. What we need is a propaganda of education for the soldier: anti-patriotic literature that will enlighten him as to the real horrors of his trade, and that will awaken his consciousness to his true relation to the man to whose labor he owes his very existence.

It is precisely this that the authorities fear most. It is already high treason for a soldier to attend a radical meeting. No doubt they will also stamp it high treason for a soldier to read a radical pamphlet. But then, has not authority from time immemorial stamped every step of progress as treasonable? Those, however, who earnestly strive for social reconstruction can well afford to face all that; for it is probably even more important to carry the truth into the barracks than into the factory. When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for that great structure wherein all nationalities shall be united into a universal brotherhood,—a truly FREE SOCIETY.

ROSA LUXEMBURG

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was born in the Russian Empire, precisely in Poland.  At the age of 18, Luxemburg migrated to Zürich, Switzerland.  She was educated and earned a doctorate degree.  She wrote about socialism by diverging from Marx’s concept of capitalism.  She challenged Marx and preferred international socialism that embodied social democratic ideas.  Her approach to Marxist theory was thus focused on a humanitarian approach to socialist theory.  Lenin used Luxemburg’s concept of international socialism. Luxemburg argued that the party was an organic evolution of worker’s needs, while Lenin promoted the Vanguard Party more hierarchical and structured.  She promoted revolutionary action while critiquing the Bolshevik revolution for its lack of democracy. She founded the Spartacus League.  She was imprisoned a few times.  Her intriguing life was tragically short.  She was killed, beaten to death, by uniformed soldiers. Some of her best known texts are The Accumulation of Capital, The Mass Strike, and Reform or Revolution among others.

The Accumulation of Capital[8]

THE CHAPTER I THE OBJECT OF OUR INVESTIGATION

Karl Marx made a contribution of lasting service to the theory of economics when he drew attention to the problem of the reproduction of the entire social capital. It is significant that in the history of economics we find only two attempts at an exact exposition of this problem: one by Quesnay, the father of the Physiocrats, at its very inception; and in its final stage this attempt by Marx. In the interim, the problem was ever with bourgeois economics. Yet bourgeois economists have never been fully aware of this problem in its pure aspects, detached from related and intersecting minor problems; they have never been able to formulate it precisely, let alone solve it. Seeing that the problem is of paramount importance, their attempts may all the same help us to some understanding of the trend of scientific economics.

What is it precisely that constitutes this problem of the reproduction of total capital? The literal meaning of the word ‘reproduction’ is repetition, renewal of the process of production. At first sight it may be difficult to see in what respect the idea of reproduction differs from that of repetition which we can all understand—why such a new and unfamiliar term should be required. But in the sort of repetition which we shall consider, in the continual recurrence of the process of production, there are certain distinctive features. First, the regular repetition of reproduction is the general sine qua non of regular consumption which in its turn has been the precondition of human civilization in every one of its historical forms. The concept of reproduction, viewed in this way, reflects an aspect of the history of civilization. Production can never be resumed, there can be no reproduction, unless certain prerequisites such as tools, raw materials and labour have been established during the preceding period of production. However, at the most primitive level of man’s civilization, at the initial stage of man’s power over nature; this possibility to re-engage in production depended more or less on chance. So long as hunting and fishing were the main foundations of social existence, frequent periods of general starvation interrupted the regular repetition of production. Some primitive peoples recognized at a very early stage that for reproduction as a regularly recurring process certain measures were essential; these they incorporated into ceremonies of a religious nature; and in this way they accepted such measures as traditional social commitments. Thus, as the thorough researches of Spencer and Gillen have taught us, the totem cult of the Australian negroes is fundamentally nothing but certain measures taken by social groups for the purpose of securing and preserving their animal and vegetable foodstuffs; these precautions had been taken year by year since time immemorial and thus they became fossilized into religious ceremonials. Yet the circle of consumption and production which forms the essence of reproduction became possible only with the invention of tillage with the hoe, with the taming of domestic animals, and with cattle-raising for the purpose of consumption. Reproduction is something more than mere repetition in so far as it presupposes a certain level of society’s supremacy over nature, or, in economic terms, a certain standard of labour productivity.

On the other hand, at all stages of social development, the process of production is based on the continuation of two different, though closely connected factors, the technical and social conditions—on the precise relationship between man and nature and that between men and men. Reproduction depends to the same degree on both these conditions. We have just seen how reproduction is bound up with the conditions of human working techniques, how far it is indeed solely the result of a certain level of labour productivity; but the social forms of production prevailing in each case are no less decisive. In a primitive communist agrarian community, reproduction as well as the whole plan of economic life is determined by the community of all workers and their democratic organs. The decision to re-engage in labour—the organization of labour—the provision of raw materials, tools, and man-power as the essential preliminaries of labour—the arrangement of reproduction and the determination of its volume are all results of a planned co-operation [Pg 33]in which everybody within the boundaries of the community takes his part. In an economic system based on slave labour or corvée, reproduction is enforced and regulated in all details by personal relations of domination. Here the volume of reproduction is determined by the right of disposal held by the ruling élites over smaller or larger circles of other people’s labour. In a society producing by capitalist methods, reproduction assumes a peculiar form, as a mere glance at certain striking phenomena will show us. In every other society known to history, reproduction recurs in a regular sequence as far as its preconditions, the existing means of production and labour power, make this possible. As a rule, only external influences such as a devastating war or a great pestilence, depopulating vast areas of former cultural life, and consequently destroying masses of labour power and of accumulated means of production, can result in a complete interruption of reproduction or in its contraction to any considerable extent for longer or shorter periods. A despotic organization of the plan of production may on occasion lead to similar phenomena. When in ancient Egypt Pharaoh’s will chained thousands of fellaheen for decades to the building of the pyramids; when in modern Egypt Ismail Pasha ordered 20,000 fellaheen to forced labour on the Suez Canal; or when, about two hundred years before Christ, the Emperor Shi Hoang Ti, founder of the Chin dynasty, allowed 400,000 people to perish of hunger and exhaustion and thus sacrificed a whole generation to his purpose of consolidating the Great Wall at China’s northern frontier, the result was always that vast stretches of arable land were left fallow and that regular economic life was interrupted for long periods. In all these cases the causes of these interruptions of reproduction obviously lay in the one-sided determination of the plan of reproduction by those in power.

Societies which produce according to capitalist methods present a different picture. We observe that in certain periods all the ingredients of reproduction may be available, both labour and means of production, and yet some vital needs of society for consumer goods may be left unfulfilled. We find that in spite of these resources reproduction may in part be completely suspended and in part curtailed. Here it is no despotic interference with the economic plan that is responsible for the difficulties in the process of production. Quite apart from all technical conditions, reproduction here depends on purely social considerations: only those goods are produced which can with certainty be expected to sell, and not merely to sell, but to sell at the customary profit. Thus profit becomes an end in itself, the decisive factor which determines not only production but also reproduction. Not only does it decide in each case what work is to be undertaken, how it is to be carried out, and how the products are to be distributed; what is more, profit decides, also, at the end of every working period, whether the labour process is to be resumed, and, if so, to what extent and in what direction it should be made to operate.

In capitalist society, therefore, the process of reproduction as a whole, constitutes a peculiar and most complicated problem, in consequence of these purely historical and social factors. There is, as we shall see, an external characteristic which shows clearly this specific historical peculiarity of the capitalist process of reproduction. Comprising not only production but also circulation (the process of exchange), it unites these two elements. Capitalist production is primarily production by innumerable private producers without any planned regulation. The only social link between these producers is the act of exchange. In taking account of social requirements reproduction has no clue to go on other than the experiences of the preceding labour period. These experiences, however, remain the private experiences of individual producers and are not integrated into a comprehensive and social form. Moreover, they do not always refer positively and directly to the needs of society. They are often rather indirect and negative, for it is only on the basis of price fluctuations that they indicate whether the aggregate of produced commodities falls short of the effective demand or exceeds it. Yet the individual private producers make recurrent use of these experiences of the preceding labour period when they re-engage in reproduction, so that glut or shortage are bound to occur again in the following period. Individual branches of production may develop independently, so that there may be a surplus in one branch and a deficiency in another. But as nearly all individual branches of production [Pg 35] are interdependent technically, glut or shortage in some of the larger branches of production lead to the same phenomenon in most of the others. Thus the general supply of products may alternate periodically between shortage and surplus relative to the social demand.

Herein lies the peculiar character of reproduction in a capitalist society, which differs from all other known forms of production. In the first place, every branch of production develops independently within certain limits, in a way that leads to periodical interruptions of production of shorter or longer duration. Secondly, the individual branches of reproduction show deviations from social requirements amounting to all-round disparity and thus resulting in a general interruption of reproduction. These features of capitalist reproduction are quite characteristic. In all other economic systems, reproduction runs its uninterrupted and regular course, apart from external disturbance by violence. Capitalist reproduction, however, to quote Sismondi’s well-known dictum, can only be represented as a continuous sequence of individual spirals. Every such spiral starts with small loops which become increasingly larger and eventually very large indeed. Then they contract, and a new spiral starts again with small loops, repeating the figure up to the point of interruption. This periodical fluctuation between the largest volume of reproduction and its contraction to partial suspension, this cycle of slump, boom, and crisis, as it has been called, is the most striking peculiarity of capitalist reproduction.

It is very important, however, to establish quite firmly and from the very outset that this cyclical movement of boom, slump, and crisis, does not represent the whole problem of capitalist reproduction, although it is an essential element of it. Periodical cycles and crises are specific phases of reproduction in a capitalist system of economy, but not the whole of this process. In order to demonstrate the pure implications of capitalist reproduction we must rather consider it quite apart from the periodical cycles and crises. Strange as this may appear, the method is quite rational; it is indeed the only method of inquiry that is scientifically tenable. In order to demonstrate and to solve the problem of pure value we must leave price fluctuations out of consideration. The approach of vulgar economics always attempts to solve the problem of value by reference to fluctuations in demand and supply. Classical economists, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, attack the problem in the opposite way, pointing out that fluctuations in the mutual relation between demand and supply can explain only disparities between price and value, not value itself. In order to find the value of a commodity, we must start by assuming that demand and supply are in a state of equilibrium, that the price of a commodity and its value closely correspond to one another. Thus the scientific problem of value begins at the very point where the effect of demand and supply ceases to operate.

In consequence of periodical cycles and crises capitalist reproduction fluctuates as a rule around the level of the effective total demand of society, sometimes rising above and sometimes falling below this level, contracting occasionally even to the point of almost complete interruption of reproduction. However, if we consider a longer period, a whole cycle with its alternating phases of prosperity and depression, of boom and slump, that is if we consider reproduction at its highest and lowest volume, including the stage of suspension, we can set off boom against slump and work out an average, a mean volume of reproduction for the whole cycle. This average is not only a theoretical figment of thought, it is also a real objective fact. For in spite of the sharp rises and falls in the course of a cycle, in spite of crises, the needs of society are always satisfied more or less, reproduction continues on its complicated course, and productive capacities develop progressively. How can this take place, leaving cycles and crises out of consideration? Here the real question begins. The attempt to solve the problem of reproduction in terms of the periodical character of crises is fundamentally a device of vulgar economics, just like the attempt to solve the problem of value in terms of fluctuations in demand and supply.

Nevertheless, we shall see in the course of our observations that as soon as economic theory gets an inkling of the problem of reproduction, as soon as it has at least started guessing at the problem, it reveals a persistent tendency suddenly to transform the problem of reproduction into the problem of crises, thus barring its own way to the solution of the question. When we speak of capitalist reproduction in the following exposition, we shall always understand by this term a mean volume of productivity which is an average taken over the various phases of a cycle.

Now, the total of capitalist reproduction is created by an unlimited and constantly changing number of private producers. They produce independently of one another; apart from the observation of price fluctuations there is no social control—no social link exists between the individual producers other than the exchange of commodities. The question arises how these innumerable disconnected operations can lead to the actual total of production. This general aspect of our problem indeed strikes us immediately as one of prime importance. But if we put it this way, we overlook the fact that such private producers are not simply producers of commodities but are essentially capitalist producers, that the total production of society is not simply production for the sake of satisfying social requirements, and equally not merely production of commodities, but essentially capitalist production.

Let us examine our problem anew in the light of this fact. A producer who produces not only commodities but capital must above all create surplus value. The capitalist producer’s final goal, his main incentive, is the production of surplus value. The proceeds from the commodities he has manufactured must not only recompense him for all his outlay, but in addition they must yield him a value which does not correspond with any expense on his part, and is pure gain. If we consider the process of production from the point of view of the creation of surplus value, we see that the capital advanced by the capitalist is divided into two parts: the first part represents his expenses on means of production such as premises, raw material, partly finished goods and machinery. The second part is spent on wages. This holds good, even if the capitalist producer does not know it himself, and in spite of the pious stuff about fixed and circulating capital with which he may delude himself and the world. Marx called this first part constant capital. Its value is not changed by its utilization in the labour process—it is transferred in toto to the finished product.

The second part Marx calls the variable capital. This gives rise to an additional value, which materializes when the results of unpaid labour are appropriated. The various components which make up the value of every commodity produced by capitalist methods may be expressed by the formula: c + v + s. In this formula c stands for the value of the constant capital laid out in inanimate means of production and transferred to the commodity, v stands for the value of the variable capital advanced in form of wages, and s stands for the surplus value, the additional value of the unpaid part of wage labour. Every type of goods shows these three components of value, whether we consider an individual commodity or the aggregate of commodities as a whole, whether we consider cotton textiles or ballet performances, cast-iron tubes or liberal newspapers. Thus for the capitalist producer the manufacture of commodities is not an end in itself, it is only a means to the appropriation of surplus value. This surplus value, however, can be of no use to the capitalist so long as it remains hidden in the commodity form of the product.

Once the commodity has been produced, it must be realized, it must be converted into a form of pure value; that is, into money. All capital expenses incorporated in the commodity must shed their commodity-form and revert to the capitalist as money to make this conversion possible so that he can appropriate the surplus value in cash. The purpose of production is fulfilled only when this conversion has been successful, only when the aggregate of commodities has been sold according to its value. The proceeds of this sale of commodities, the money that has been received for them, contains the same components of value as the former aggregate of commodities and can be expressed by the same formula c + v + s. Part c recompenses the capitalist for his advances on means of production that have been used up, part v recompenses him for his advances on wages, and the last part, s, represents the expected surplus, the capitalist’s clear profit in cash.

This conversion of capital from its original form, from the starting point of all capitalist production, into means of production, dead and living, such as raw materials, instruments, and labour; its further conversion into commodities by a living labour process; and its final reconversion into money, a greater amount of money indeed than at the initial stage—this transformation of capital is, however, required for more than the production and appropriation of surplus value. The aim and incentive of capitalist production is not a surplus value pure and simple, to be appropriated in any desired quantity, but a surplus value ever growing into larger quantities, surplus value ad infinitum. But to achieve this aim, the same magic means must be used over and over again, the means of capitalist production—the ever repeated appropriation of the proceeds of unpaid wage labour in the process of commodity manufacture, and the subsequent realization of the commodities so produced.

Thus quite a new incentive is given to constantly renewed production, to the process of reproduction as a regular phenomenon in capitalist society, an incentive unknown to any other system of production. In every other economic system known to history, reproduction is determined by the unceasing need of society for consumer goods, whether they are the needs of all the workers determined in a democratic manner as in an agrarian and communist market community, or the despotically determined needs of an antagonistic class society, as in an economy of slave labour or corvée and the like. But in a capitalist system of production, it is not consideration of social needs which actuates the individual private producer who alone matters in this connection. His production is determined entirely by the effective demand, and even this is to him a mere means for the realization of surplus value which for him is indispensable. Appropriation of surplus value is his real incentive, and production of consumer goods for the satisfaction of the effective demand is only a detour when we look to the real motive, that of appropriation of surplus value, although for the individual capitalist it is also a rule of necessity. This motive, to appropriate surplus value, also urges him to re-engage in reproduction over and over again. It is the production of surplus value which turns reproduction of social necessities into a perpetuum mobile. Reproduction, for its part, can obviously be only resumed when the products of the previous period, the commodities, have been realized; that is, converted into money; for capital in the form of money, in the form of pure value, must always be the starting point of reproduction in a capitalist system. The first condition of reproduction for the capitalist producer is thus seen to be a successful realization of the commodities produced during the preceding period of production.

Now we come to a second important point. Under a system of private economy, it is the individual producer who determines the volume of reproduction at his discretion. His main incentive is appropriation of surplus value, indeed an appropriation increasing as rapidly as possible. An accelerated appropriation of surplus value, however, necessitates an increased production of capital to generate this surplus value. Here a large-scale enterprise enjoys advantages over a small one in every respect. In fine, the capitalist method of production furnishes not only a permanent incentive to reproduction in general, but also a motive for its expansion, for reproduction on an ever larger scale.

Nor is that all. Capitalist methods of production do more than awaken in the capitalist this thirst for surplus value whereby he is impelled to ceaseless expansion of reproduction. Expansion becomes in truth a coercive law, an economic condition of existence for the individual capitalist. Under the rule of competition, cheapness of commodities is the most important weapon of the individual capitalist in his struggle for a place in the market. Now all methods of reducing the cost of commodity production permanently amount in the end to an expansion of production; excepting those only which aim at a specific increase of the rate of surplus value by measures such as wage-cutting or lengthening the hours of work.

As for these latter devices, they are as such likely to encounter many obstacles. In this respect, a large enterprise invariably enjoys advantages of every kind over a small or medium concern. They may range from a saving in premises or instruments, in the application of more efficient means of production, in extensive replacement of manual labour by machinery, down to a speedy exploitation of a favourable turn of the market so as to acquire raw materials cheaply. Within very wide limits, these advantages increase in direct proportion to the expansion of the enterprise. Thus, as soon as a few capitalist enterprises have been enlarged, competition itself forces all others to expand likewise. Expansion becomes a condition of existence. A growing tendency towards reproduction at a progressively increasing scale thus ensues,  which spreads automatically like a tidal wave over ever larger surfaces of reproduction.

Expanding reproduction is not a new discovery of capital. On the contrary, it had been the rule since time immemorial in every form of society that displayed economic and cultural progress. It is true, of course, that simple reproduction as a mere continuous repetition of the process of production on the same scale as before can be observed over long periods of social history. In the ancient agrarian and communist village communities, for instance, increase in population did not lead to a gradual expansion of production, but rather to the new generation being expelled and the subsequent founding of equally small and self-sufficient colonies. The old small handicraft units of India and China provide similar instances of a traditional repetition of production in the same forms and on the same scale, handed down from generation to generation. But simple reproduction is in all these cases the source and unmistakable sign of a general economic and cultural stagnation. No important forward step in production, no memorial of civilization, such as the great waterworks of the East, the pyramids of Egypt, the military roads of Rome, the Arts and Sciences of Greece, or the development of craftsmanship and towns in the Middle Ages would have been possible without expanding reproduction; for the basis and also the social incentive for a decisive advancement of civilization lies solely in the gradual expansion of production beyond immediate requirements, and in a continual growth of the population itself as well as of its demands.

Exchange in particular, which brought about a class society, and its historical development into the capitalist form of economy, would have been unthinkable without expanding reproduction. In a capitalist society, moreover, expanding reproduction acquires certain characteristics. As we have already mentioned, it becomes right away a coercive law to the individual capitalist. Capitalist methods of production do not exclude simple or even retrogressive reproduction; indeed, this is responsible for the periodical phenomenon of crises following phases, likewise periodical, of overstrained expansion of reproduction in times of boom. But ignoring periodical fluctuations, the general trend of reproduction is ever towards expansion. For the individual capitalist, failure to keep abreast of this expansion means quitting the competitive struggle, economic death.

Moreover, there are certain other aspects to be considered. The concept of expanding reproduction applies only to the quantity of products, to the aggregate of manufactured objects. So long as production rests solely or mainly upon a natural economy, consumption determines the extent and character of the individual labour process, as well as that of reproduction in general, as an end in itself: this applies to the agrarian and communist village communities of India, to the Roman villa with its economy of slave labour, and to the medieval feudal farm based on corvée. But the picture is different in a capitalist economic system. Capitalist production is not production for the purpose of consumption, it is production for the purpose of creating value. The whole process of production as well as of reproduction is ruled by value relationships. Capitalist production is not the production of consumer goods, nor is it merely the production of commodities: it is pre-eminently the production of surplus value. Expanding reproduction, from a capitalist point of view, is expanding production of surplus value, though it takes place in the forms of commodity production and is thus in the last instance the production of consumer goods. Changes in the productivity of labour during the course of reproduction cause continual discrepancies between these two aspects. If productivity increases, the same amount of capital and surplus value may represent a progressively larger amount of consumer goods. Expanding production, understood as the creation of a greater amount of surplus value, need not therefore necessarily imply expanding reproduction in the capitalist meaning of the term. Conversely, capital may, within limits, yield a greater surplus value in consequence of a higher degree of exploitation such as is brought about by wage-cutting and the like, without actually producing a greater amount of goods. But in both cases the surplus value has a twofold aspect: it is a quantity of value as well as an aggregate of material products, and from a capitalist point of view, its elements in both instances are thus the same.

As a rule, an increased production of surplus value results from an increase of capital brought about by addition of part of the appropriated surplus value to the original capital, no matter whether this capitalist surplus value is used for the expansion of an old enterprise or for founding a new one, an independent offshoot. Capitalist expanding reproduction thus acquires the specific characteristics of an increase in capital by means of a progressive capitalization of surplus value, or, as

Marx has put it, by the accumulation of capital.

The general formula for enlarged reproduction under the rule of capital thus runs as follows: c + v + s⁄x + s´. Here s⁄x stands for the capitalized part of the surplus value appropriated in an earlier period of production; s´ stands for the new surplus value created by the increased capital. Part of this new surplus value is capitalized again, and expanding reproduction is thus, from the capitalist point of view, a constantly flowing process of alternate appropriation and capitalization of surplus value.

So far, however, we have only arrived at a general and abstract formula for reproduction. Let us now consider more closely the concrete conditions which are necessary to apply this formula.

The surplus value which has been appropriated, after it has successfully cast off its commodity-form in the market, appears as a given amount of money. This money-form is the form of its absolute value, the beginning of its career as capital. But as it is impossible to create surplus value with money, it cannot, in this form, advance beyond the threshold of its career. Capital must assume commodity-form, so that the particular portion of it which is earmarked for accumulation can be capitalized. For only in this form can it become productive capital; that is, capital begetting new surplus value. Therefore, like the original capital, it must again be divided into two parts; a constant part, comprising the inanimate means of production, and a variable part, the wages. Only then will our formula c + v + s apply to it in the same way as it applied to the old capital.

But the good intent of the capitalist to accumulate, his thrift and abstinence which make him use the greater part of his surplus value for production instead of squandering it on personal luxuries, is not sufficient for this purpose. On the contrary, it is essential that he should find on the commodity market the concrete forms which he intends to give his new surplus value. In the first place, he must secure the material means of production such as raw materials, machines etc. required for the branch of production he has chosen and planned, so that the particular part of the surplus value which corresponds to his constant capital may assume a productive form. Secondly, the other, variable part of his surplus value must also be convertible, and two essentials are necessary for this conversion: of first importance, the labour market must offer a sufficient quantity of additional labour, and secondly, as the workers cannot live on money alone, the commodity market, too, must offer an additional amount of provisions, which the workers newly to be employed may exchange against the variable part of the surplus value they will get from the capitalist.

All these prerequisites found, the capitalist can set his capitalized surplus value to work and make it, as operating capital, beget new surplus value. But still his task is not completely done. Both the new capital and the surplus value produced still exist for the time being in the shape of an additional quantity of some commodity or other. In this form the new capital is but advanced, and the new surplus value created by it is still in a form in which it is of no use to the capitalist. The new capital as well as the surplus value which it has created must cast off their commodity-form, re-assume the form of pure value, and thus revert to the capitalist as money. Unless this process is successfully concluded, the new capital and surplus value will be wholly or partly lost, the capitalization of surplus value will have miscarried, and there will have been no accumulation. It is absolutely essential to the accumulation of capital that a sufficient quantity of commodities created by the new capital should win a place for itself on the market and be realized.

Thus we see that expanding reproduction as accumulation of capital in a capitalist system is bound up with a whole series of special conditions. Let us look at these more closely. The first condition is that production should create surplus value, for surplus value is the elementary form in which alone increased production is possible under capitalist conditions. The entire process of production must abide by this condition when determining the relations between capitalist and worker in the production of commodities. Once this first condition is given, the second is that surplus value must be realized, converted into the form of money, so that it can be appropriated for the purposes of expanding reproduction. This second condition thus leads us to the commodity market. Here, the hazards of exchange decide the further fate of the surplus value, and thus the future of reproduction. The third condition is as follows: provided that part of the realized surplus value has been added to capital for the purpose of accumulation, this new capital must first assume its productive form of labour and inanimate means of production. Moreover, that part of it which had been exchanged for labour must be converted into provisions for the workers. Thus we are led again to the markets of labour and commodities. If all these requirements have been met and enlarged reproduction of commodities has taken place, a fourth condition must be added: the additional quantity of commodities representing the new capital plus surplus value will have to be realized, that is, reconverted into money. Only if this conversion has been successful, can it be said that expanding capitalist reproduction has actually taken place. This last condition leads us back to the commodity market.

Thus capitalist production and reproduction imply a constant shifting between the place of production and the commodity market, a shuttle movement from the private office and the factory where unauthorized persons are strictly excluded, where the sovereign will of the individual capitalist is the highest law, to the commodity market where nobody sets up any laws and where neither will nor reason assert themselves. But it is this very license and anarchy of the commodity market which brings home to the individual capitalist that he is dependent upon society, upon the entirety of its producing and consuming members. The individual capitalist may need additional means of production, additional labour and provisions for these workers in order to expand reproduction, but whether he can get what he needs depends upon factors and events beyond his control, materializing, as it were, behind his back. In order to realize his increased aggregate of products, the individual capitalist requires a larger market for his goods, but he has no control whatever over the actual increase of demand in general, or of the particular demand for his special kind of good.

The conditions we have enumerated here, which all give expression to the inherent contradiction between consumption and private production and their social interconnection, are nothing new, and it is not only at the stage of reproduction that they become apparent. These conditions express the general contradiction inherent in capitalist production. They involve, however, particular difficulties as regards the process of reproduction for the following reasons. With regard to reproduction, especially expanding reproduction, the capitalist method of production not only reveals its general fundamental character, but, what is more, it shows, in the various periods of production, a definite rhythm within a continuous progression—the characteristic interplay of individual wills. From this point of view, we must inquire in a general way how it is possible for every individual capitalist to find on the market the means of production and the labour he requires for the purpose of realizing the commodities he has produced, although there exists no social control whatever, no plan to harmonize production and demand. This question may be answered by saying that the capitalist’s greed for surplus value, enhanced by competition, and the automatic effects of capitalist exploitation, lead to the production of every kind of commodity, including means of production, and also that a growing class of proletarianized workers becomes generally available for the purposes of capital. On the other hand, the lack of a plan in this respect shows itself in the fact that the balance between demand and supply in all spheres can be achieved only by continuous deviations, by hourly fluctuations of prices, and by periodical crises and changes of the market situation.

From the point of view of reproduction the question is a different one. How is it possible that the unplanned supply in the market for labour and means of production, and the unplanned and incalculable changes in demand nevertheless provide adequate quantities and qualities of means of production, labour and opportunities for selling which the individual capitalist needs in order to make a sale? How can it be assured that every one of these factors increases in the right proportion? Let us put the problem more precisely. According to our well-known formula, let the composition of the individual capitalist’s production be expressed by the proportion 40c + 10v + 10s. His constant capital is consequently four times as much as his variable capital, and the rate of exploitation is 100 per cent. The aggregate of commodities is thus represented by a value of 60. Let us now assume that the capitalist is in a position to capitalize and to add to the old capital of this given composition half of his surplus value. In this case, the formula 44c + 11v + 11s = 66 would apply to the next period of production.

Let us assume now that the capitalist can continue the annual capitalization of half his surplus value for a number of years. For this purpose it is not sufficient that means of production, labour and markets in general should be forthcoming, but he must find these factors in a proportion that is strictly in keeping with his progress in accumulation.

CHAPTER XXVI THE REPRODUCTION OF CAPITAL AND ITS SOCIAL SETTING

Marx’s diagram of enlarged reproduction cannot explain the actual and historical process of accumulation. And why? Because of the very premises of the diagram. The diagram sets out to describe the accumulative process on the assumption that the capitalists and workers are the sole agents of capitalist consumption. We have seen that Marx consistently and deliberately assumes the universal and exclusive domination of the capitalist mode of production as a theoretical premise of his analysis in all three volumes of Capital. Under these conditions, there can admittedly be no other classes of society than capitalists and workers; as the diagram has it, all ‘third persons’ of capitalist society—civil servants, the liberal professions, the clergy, etc.—must, as consumers, be counted in with these two classes, and preferably with the capitalist class. This axiom, however, is a theoretical contrivance—real life has never known a self-sufficient capitalist society under the exclusive domination of the capitalist mode of production. This theoretical device is perfectly admissible so long as it merely helps to demonstrate the problem in its integrity and does not interfere with its very conditions. A case in point is the analysis of simple reproduction of the aggregate social capital, where the problem itself rests upon a fiction: in a society producing by capitalist methods, i.e. a society which creates surplus value, the whole of the latter is taken to be consumed by the capitalists who appropriate it. The object is to present the forms of social production and reproduction under these given conditions. Here the very formulation of the problem implies that production knows no other consumers than capitalists and workers and thus strictly conforms to Marx’s premise: universal and exclusive domination of the capitalist mode of production. The implications of both fictions are the same. Similarly, it is quite legitimate to postulate absolute dominance of capital in an analysis of the accumulation of individual capitals, such as is given in Capital, volume i. The reproduction of individual capitals is an element in total social reproduction but one which follows an independent course, contrary to the movements of the other elements. In consequence it will not do simply to take together the individual movements of the respective capitals in order to arrive at the total movement of social capital, since the latter is essentially different. The natural conditions of reproducing individual capitals therefore neither conform with one another, nor do they conform to the relations of the total capital. Under normal conditions of circulation, every individual capital engages in the process of circulation and of accumulation entirely on its own account, depending upon others only in so far, of course, as it is compelled to find a market for its product and must find available the means of production it requires for its specific activities. Whether the strata who afford this market and provide the necessary means of production are themselves capitalist producers or not is completely immaterial for the individual capital, although, in theory, the most favourable premise for analyzing the accumulation of individual capital is the assumption that capitalist production has attained universal and exclusive domination and is the sole setting of this process.

Now, however, the question arises whether the assumptions which were decisive in the case of individual capital, are also legitimate for the consideration of aggregate capital.

‘We must now put the problem in this form: given universal accumulation, that is to say provided that in all branches of production there is greater or less accumulation of capital—which in fact is a condition of capitalist production, and which is just as natural to the capitalist qua capitalist as it is natural to the miser to amass money (but which is also necessary for the perpetuation of capitalist production)—what are the conditions of this universal accumulation, to what elements can it be reduced?’

And the answer: ‘The conditions for the accumulation of capital are precisely those which rule its original production and reproduction in general: these conditions being that one part of the money buys labour and the other commodities (raw materials, machinery, etc.) … Accumulation of new capital can only proceed therefore under the same conditions under which already existing capital is reproduced.’

In real life the actual conditions for the accumulation of the aggregate capital are quite different from those prevailing for individual capitals and for simple reproduction. The problem amounts to this: If an increasing part of the surplus value is not consumed by the capitalists but employed in the expansion of production, what, then, are the forms of social reproduction? What is left of the social product after deductions for the replacement of the constant capital cannot, ex hypothesi, be absorbed by the consumption of the workers and capitalists—this being the main aspect of the problem—nor can the workers and capitalists themselves realize the aggregate product. They can always only realize the variable capital, that part of the constant capital which will be used up, and the part of the surplus value which will be consumed, but in this way they merely ensure that production can be renewed on its previous scale. The workers and capitalists themselves cannot possibly realize that part of the surplus value which is to be capitalized. Therefore, the realization of the surplus value for the purposes of accumulation is an impossible task for a society which consists solely of workers and capitalists. Strangely enough, all theorists who analyzed the problem of accumulation, from Ricardo and Sismondi to Marx, started with the very assumption which makes their problem insoluble. A sure instinct that realization of the surplus value requires ‘third persons’, that is to say consumers other than the immediate agents of capitalist production (i.e. workers and capitalists) led to all kinds of subterfuges: ‘unproductive consumption’ as presented by Malthus in the person of the feudal landowner, by Vorontsov in militarism, by Struve in the ‘liberal professions’ and other hangers-on of the capitalist class; or else foreign trade is brought into play which proved a useful safety valve to all those who regarded accumulation with sceptisism, from Sismondi to Nicolayon. Because of these insoluble difficulties, others like v. Kirchmann and Rodbertus tried to do without accumulation altogether, or, like Sismondi and his Russian ‘populist’ followers, stressed the need for at least putting the dampers on accumulation as much as possible.

The salient feature of the problem of accumulation, and the vulnerable point of earlier attempts to solve it, has only been shown up by Marx’s more profound analysis, his precise diagrammatic demonstration of the total reproductive process, and especially his inspired exposition of the problem of simple reproduction. Yet he could not supply immediately a finished solution either, partly because he broke off his analysis almost as soon as he had begun it, and partly because he was then preoccupied, as we have shown, with denouncing the analysis of Adam Smith and thus rather lost sight of the main problem. In fact, he made the solution even more difficult by assuming the capitalist mode of production to prevail universally. Nevertheless, a solution of the problem of accumulation, in harmony both with other parts of Marx’s doctrine and with the historical experience and daily practice of capitalism, is implied in Marx’s complete analysis of simple reproduction and his characterization of the capitalist process as a whole which shows up its immanent contradictions and their development (in Capital, vol. iii). In the light of this, the deficiencies of the diagram can be corrected. All the relations being, as it were, incomplete, a closer study of the diagram of enlarged reproduction will reveal that it points to some sort of organization more advanced than purely capitalist production and accumulation.

Up to now we have only considered one aspect of enlarged reproduction, the problem of realizing the surplus value, whose difficulties hitherto had claimed the sceptics’ whole attention. Realization of the surplus value is doubtless a vital question of capitalist accumulation. It requires as its prime condition—ignoring, for simplicity’s sake, the capitalists’ fund of consumption altogether—that there should be strata of buyers outside capitalist society. Buyers, it should be noted, not consumers, since the material form of the surplus value is quite irrelevant to its realization. The decisive fact is that the surplus value cannot be realized by sale either to workers or to capitalists, but only [Pg 352] if it is sold to such social organizations or strata whose own mode of production is not capitalistic. Here we can conceive of two different cases:

(1) Capitalist production supplies consumer goods over and above its own requirements, the demand of its workers and capitalists, which are bought by non-capitalist strata and countries. The English cotton industry, for instance, during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, and to some extent even now, has been supplying cotton textiles to the peasants and petty-bourgeois townspeople of the European continent, and to the peasants of India, America, Africa and so on. The enormous expansion of the English cotton industry was thus founded on consumption by non-capitalist strata and countries.  In England herself, this flourishing cotton industry called forth large-scale development in the production of industrial machinery (bobbins and weaving-looms), and further in the metal and coal industries and so on. In this instance, Department II realized its products to an increasing extent by sale to non-capitalist social strata, and by its own accumulation it created on its part an increasing demand for the home produce of Department I, thus helping the latter to realize its surplus value and to increase its own accumulation.

(2) Conversely, capitalist production supplies means of production in excess of its own demand and finds buyers in non-capitalist countries. English industry, for instance, in the first half of the nineteenth century supplied materials for the construction  of railroads in the American and Australian states. (The building of railways cannot in itself be taken as evidence for the domination of capitalist production in a country. As a matter of fact, the railways in this case provided only one of the first conditions for the inauguration of capitalist production.) Another example would be the German chemical industry which supplies means of production such as dyes in great quantities to Asiatic, African and other countries whose own production is not capitalistic. Here Department I realizes its products in extra-capitalist circles. The resulting progressive expansion of Department I gives rise to a corresponding expansion of Department II in the same (capitalistically producing) country in order to supply the means of subsistence for the growing army of workers in Department I.

Each of these cases differs from Marx’s diagram. In one case, the product of Department II exceeds the needs of both departments, measured by the variable capital and the consumed part of the surplus value. In the second case, the product of Department I exceeds the volume of constant capital in both departments, enlarged though it is for the purpose of expanding production. In both cases, the surplus value does not come into being in that natural form which would make its capitalization in either department possible and necessary. These two prototypes continually overlap in real life, supplement each other and merge.

In this contest, one point seems still obscure. The surplus of consumer goods, say cotton fabrics, which is sold to non-capitalist countries, does not exclusively represent surplus value, but, as a capitalist commodity, it embodies also constant and variable capital. It seems quite arbitrary to assume that just those commodities which are sold outside the capitalist strata of society should represent nothing but surplus value. On the other hand, Department I clearly can in this case not only realize its surplus value but also accumulate, and that without requiring another market for its product than the two departments of capitalist production. Yet both these objections are only apparent. All we need remember is that each component of the aggregate product represents a proportion of the total value, that under conditions of capitalist production not only the aggregate product but every single commodity contains surplus value; which consideration does not prevent the individual capitalist, however, from computing that the sale of his specific commodities must first reimburse him for his outlay on constant capital and secondly replace his variable capital (or, rather loosely, but in accordance with actual practice: it must first replace his fixed, and then his circulating capital); what then remains will go down as profit. Similarly, we can divide the aggregate social product into three proportionate parts which, in terms of value, correspond to (1) the constant capital that has been used up in society, (2) the variable capital, and (3) the extracted surplus value. In the case of simple reproduction these proportions are also reflected in the material shape of the aggregate product: the constant capital materializes as means of production, the variable capital as means of subsistence for the workers, and the surplus value as means of subsistence for the capitalist. Yet as we know, the concept of simple reproduction with consumption of the entire surplus value by the capitalists is a mere fiction. As for enlarged reproduction or accumulation, in Marx’s diagram the composition of the social product in terms of value is also strictly in proportion to its material form: the surplus value, or rather that part of it which is earmarked for capitalization, has from the very beginning the form of material means of production and means of subsistence for the workers in a ratio appropriate to the expansion of production on a given technical basis. As we have seen, this conception, which is based upon the self-sufficiency and isolation of capitalist production, falls down as soon as we consider the realization of the surplus value. If we assume, however, that the surplus value is realized outside the sphere of capitalist production, then its material form is independent of the requirements of capitalist production itself. Its material form conforms to the requirements of those non-capitalist circles who help to realize it, that is to say, capitalist surplus value can take the form of consumer goods, e.g. cotton fabrics, or of means of production, e.g. materials for railway construction, as the case may be. If one department realizes its surplus value by exporting its products, and with the ensuing expansion of production helps the other department to realize its surplus value on the home market, then the fact still remains that the social surplus value must yet be taken as realized outside the two departments, either mediately or immediately. Similar considerations enable the individual capitalist to realize his surplus value, even if the whole of his commodities can only replace either the variable or the constant capital of another capitalist.

Nor is the realization of the surplus value the only vital aspect of reproduction. Given that Department I has disposed of its surplus value outside, thereby starting the process of accumulation, and further, that it can expect a new increase in the demand in non-capitalist circles, these two conditions add up to only half of what is required for accumulation. There is many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip. The second requirement of accumulation is access to material elements necessary for expanding reproduction. Seeing that we have just turned the surplus product of Department I into money by getting rid of the surplus means of production to non-capitalist circles, from where are these material elements then to come? The transaction which is the portal for realizing the surplus value is also, as it were, a backdoor out of which flies all possibility of converting this realized surplus value into productive capital—one leads to the nether regions and the other to the deep sea. Let us take a closer look.

Here we use c in both Departments I and II as if it were the entire constant capital in production. Yet this we know is wrong. Only for the sake of simplifying the diagram have we disregarded that the c which figures in Departments I and II of the diagram is only part of the aggregate constant capital of society, that is to say that part which, circulating during one year, is used up and embodied in the products of one period of production. Yet it would be perfectly absurd if capitalist production—or any other—would use up its entire constant capital and create it anew in every period of production. On the contrary, we assume that the whole mass of means of production, for the periodical total renewal of which the diagram provides in annual installments—renewal of the used-up part—lies at the back of production as presented in the diagram. With progressing labour productivity and an expanding volume of production, this mass increases not only absolutely but also relatively to the part which is consumed in production in every case, together with a corresponding increase in the efficiency of the constant capital. It is the more intensive exploitation of this part of the constant capital, irrespective of its increase in value, which is of paramount importance for the expansion of production.

‘In the extractive industries, mines, etc., the raw materials form no part of the capital advanced. The subject of labour is in this case not a product of previous labour, but is furnished by Nature gratis, as in the case of metals, minerals, coal, stone, etc. In these cases the constant capital consists almost exclusively of instruments of labour, which can very well absorb an increased quantity of labour (day and night shifts of labourers, e.g.). All other things being equal, the mass and value of the product will rise in direct proportion to the labour expended. As on the first day of production, the original produce-formers, now turned into the creators of the material elements of capital—man and Nature—still work together. Thanks to the elasticity of labour-power, the domain of accumulation has extended without any previous enlargement of constant capital.—In agriculture the land under cultivation cannot be increased without the advance of more seed and manure. But this advance once made, the purely mechanical working of the soil itself produces a marvellous effect on the amount of the product. A greater quantity of labour, done by the same number of labourers as before, thus increases the fertility, without requiring any new advance in the instruments of labour. It is once again the direct action of man on Nature which becomes an immediate source of greater accumulation, without the intervention of any new capital. Finally, in what is called manufacturing industry, every additional expenditure of labour presupposes a corresponding additional expenditure of raw materials, but not necessarily of instruments of labour. And as extractive industry and agriculture supply manufacturing industry with its raw materials and those of its instruments of labour, the additional product the former have created without additional advance of capital, tells also in favour of the latter.—General result: by incorporating with itself the two primary creators of wealth, labour-power and the land, capital acquires a power of expansion that permits it to augment the elements of its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude, or by the value and the mass of the means of production, already produced, in which it has its being.’

In addition, there is no obvious reason why means of production and consumer goods should be produced by capitalist methods alone. This assumption, for all Marx used it as the cornerstone of his thesis, is in conformity neither with the daily practice, and the history, of capital, nor with the specific character of this mode of production. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a great part of the surplus value in England was produced in form of cotton fabrics. Yet the material elements for the capitalization of this surplus value, although they certainly represented a surplus product, still were by no means all capitalist surplus value, to mention only raw cotton from the slave states of the American Union, or grain (a means of subsistence for the English workers) from the fields of serf-owning Russia. How much capitalist accumulation depends upon means of production which are not produced by capitalist methods is shown for example by the cotton crisis in England during the American War of Secession, when the cultivation of the plantations came to a standstill, or by the crisis of European linen-weaving during the war in the East, when flax could not be imported from serf-owning Russia. We need only recall that imports of corn raised by peasants—i.e. not produced by capitalist methods—played a vital part in the feeding of industrial labour, as an element, that is to say, of variable capital, for a further illustration of the close ties between non-capitalist strata and the material elements necessary to the accumulation of capital.

Moreover, capitalist production, by its very nature, cannot be restricted to such means of production as are produced by capitalist methods. Cheap elements of constant capital are essential to the individual capitalist who strives to increase his rate of profit. In addition, the very condition of continuous improvements in labour productivity as the most important method of increasing the rate of surplus value, is unrestricted utilization of all substances and facilities afforded by nature and soil.

To tolerate any restriction in this respect would be contrary to the very essence of capital, its whole mode of existence. After many centuries of development, the capitalist mode of production still constitutes only a fragment of total world production. Even in the small Continent of Europe, where it now chiefly prevails, it has not yet succeeded in dominating entire branches of production, such as peasant agriculture and the independent handicrafts; the same holds true, further, for large parts of North America and for a number of regions in the other continents. In general, capitalist production has hitherto been confined mainly to the countries in the temperate zone, whilst it made comparatively little progress in the East, for instance, and the South. Thus, if it were dependent exclusively on elements of production obtainable within such narrow limits, its present level and indeed its development in general would have been impossible. From the very beginning, the forms and laws of capitalist production aim to comprise the entire globe as a store of productive forces. Capital, impelled to appropriate productive forces for purposes of exploitation, ransacks the whole world, it procures its means of production from all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilization and from all forms of society. The problem of the material elements of capitalist accumulation, far from being solved by the material form of the surplus value that has been produced, takes on quite a different aspect. It becomes necessary for capital progressively to dispose ever more fully of the whole globe, to acquire an unlimited choice of means of production, with regard to both quality and quantity, so as to find productive employment for the surplus value it has realized.

The process of accumulation, elastic and spasmodic as it is, requires inevitably free access to ever new areas of raw materials in case of need, both when imports from old sources fail or when social demand suddenly increases. When the War of Secession interfered with the import of American cotton, causing the notorious ‘cotton famine’ in the Lancashire district, new and immense cotton plantations sprang up in Egypt almost at once, as if by magic. Here it was Oriental despotism, combined with an ancient system of bondage, which had created a sphere of activity for European capital. Only capital with its technical resources can effect such a miraculous change in so short a time—but only on the pre-capitalist soil of more primitive social conditions can it develop the ascendancy necessary to achieve such miracles. Another example of the same kind is the enormous increase in the world consumption of rubber which at present (1912) necessitates a supply of latex to the value of £50,000,000 per annum. The economic basis for the production of raw materials is a primitive system of exploitation practiced by European capital in the African colonies and in America, where the institutions of slavery and bondage are combined in various forms.

Between the production of surplus value, then, and the subsequent period of accumulation, two separate transactions take place—that of realizing the surplus value, i.e. of converting it into pure value, and that of transforming this pure value into productive capital. They are both dealings between capitalist production and the surrounding non-capitalist world. From the aspect both of realizing the surplus value and of procuring the material elements of constant capital, international trade is a prime necessity for the historical existence of capitalism—an international trade which under actual conditions is essentially an exchange between capitalistic and non-capitalistic modes of production.

Hitherto we have considered accumulation solely with regard to surplus value and constant capital. The third element of accumulation is variable capital which increases with progressive accumulation. In Marx’s diagram, the social product contains ever more means of subsistence for the workers as the material form proper to this variable capital. The variable capital, however, is not really the means of subsistence for the workers but is in fact living labour for whose reproduction these means of subsistence are necessary. One of the fundamental conditions of accumulation is therefore a supply of living labour which can be mobilized by capital to meet its demands. This supply can be increased under favourable conditions—but only up to a certain point—by longer hours and more intensive work. Both these methods of increasing the supply, however, do not enlarge the variable capital, or do so only to a small extent (e.g. payment for overtime).

Moreover, they are confined to definite and rather narrow limits which they cannot exceed owing to both natural and social causes. The increasing growth of variable capital which accompanies accumulation must therefore become manifest in ever greater numbers of employed labour. Where can this additional labour be found?

In his analysis of the accumulation of individual capital, Marx gives the following answer: ‘Now in order to allow of these elements actually functioning as capital, the capitalist class requires additional labour. If the exploitation of the labourers already employed does not increase, either extensively or intensively, then additional labour-power must be found. For this the mechanism of capitalist production provides beforehand, by converting the working class into a class dependent on wages, a class whose ordinary wages suffice, not only for its maintenance, but for its increase. It is only necessary for capital to incorporate this additional labour-power, annually supplied by the working class in the shape of labourers of all ages, with the surplus means of production comprised in the annual produce, and the conversion of surplus-value into capital is complete.’

Thus the increase in the variable capital is directly and exclusively attributed to the natural physical increase of a working class already dominated by capital. This is in strict conformity with the diagram of enlarged reproduction which recognizes only the social classes of capitalists and workers, and regards the capitalist mode of production as exclusive and absolute. On these assumptions, the natural increase of the working class is the only source of extending the labour supply commanded by capital. This view, however, is contrary to the laws governing the process of accumulation. The natural propagation of the workers and the requirements of accumulating capital are not correlative in respect of time or quantity. Marx himself has most brilliantly shown that natural propagation cannot keep up with the sudden expansive needs of capital. If natural propagation were the only foundation for the development of capital, accumulation, in its periodical swings from overstrain to exhaustion, could not continue, nor could the productive sphere expand by leaps and bounds, and accumulation itself would become impossible. The latter requires an unlimited freedom of movement in respect of the growth of variable capital equal to that which it enjoys with regard to the elements of constant capital—that is to say it must needs dispose over the supply of labour power without restriction. Marx considers that this can be achieved by an ‘industrial reserve army of workers’. His diagram of simple reproduction admittedly does not recognize such an army, nor could it have room for it, since the natural propagation of the capitalist wage proletariat cannot provide an industrial reserve army. Labour for this army is recruited from social reservoirs outside the dominion of capital—it is drawn into the wage proletariat only if need arises. Only the existence of non-capitalist groups and countries can guarantee such a supply of additional labour power for capitalist production. Yet in his analysis of the industrial reserve army Marx only allows for (a) the displacement of older workers by machinery, (b) an influx of rural workers into the towns in consequence of the ascendancy of capitalist production in agriculture, (c) occasional labour that has dropped out of industry, and (d) finally the lowest residue of relative over-population, the paupers. All these categories are cast off by the capitalist system of production in some form or other, they constitute a wage proletariat that is worn out and made redundant one way or another. Marx, obviously influenced by English conditions involving a high level of capitalist development, held that the rural workers who continually migrate to the towns belong to the wage proletariat, since they were formerly dominated by agricultural capital and now become subject to industrial capital. He ignores, however, the problem which is of paramount importance for conditions on the continent of Europe, namely the sources from which this urban and rural proletariat is recruited: the continual process by which the rural and urban middle strata become proletarian with the decay of peasant economy and of small artisan enterprises, the very process, that is to say, of incessant transition from non-capitalist to capitalist conditions of a labour power that is cast off by pre-capitalist, not capitalist, modes of production in their progressive breakdown and disintegration. Besides the decay of European peasants and artisans we must here also mention the disintegration of the most varied primitive forms of production and of social organization in non-European countries.

Since capitalist production can develop fully only with complete access to all territories and climes, it can no more confine itself to the natural resources and productive forces of the temperate zone than it can manage with white labour alone. Capital needs other races to exploit territories where the white man cannot work. It must be able to mobilize world labour power without restriction in order to utilize all productive forces of the globe—up to the limits imposed by a system of producing surplus value. This labour power, however, is in most cases rigidly bound by the traditional pre-capitalist organization of production. It must first be ‘set free’ in order to be enrolled in the active army of capital. The emancipation of labour power from primitive social conditions and its absorption by the capitalist wage system is one of the indispensable historical bases of capitalism. For the first genuinely capitalist branch of production, the English cotton industry, not only the cotton of the Southern states of the American Union was essential, but also the millions of African Negroes who were shipped to America to provide the labour power for the plantations, and who later, as a free proletariat, were incorporated in the class of wage labourers in a capitalist system. Obtaining the necessary labour power from non-capitalist societies, the so-called ‘labour-problem’, is ever more important for capital in the colonies. All possible methods of ‘gentle compulsion’ are applied to solving this problem, to transfer labour from former social systems to the command of capital. This endeavour leads to the most peculiar combinations between the modern wage system and primitive authority in the colonial countries. This is a concrete example of the fact that capitalist production cannot manage without labour power from other social organizations.

Admittedly, Marx dealt in detail with the process of appropriating non-capitalist means of production as well as with the transformation of the peasants into a capitalist proletariat. Chapter xxiv of Capital, vol. i, is devoted to describing the origin of the English proletariat, of the capitalistic agricultural tenant class and of industrial capital, with particular emphasis on the looting of colonial countries by European capital. Yet we must bear in mind that all this is treated solely with a view to so-called primitive accumulation. For Marx, these processes are incidental, illustrating merely the genesis of capital, its first appearance in the world; they are, as it were, travails by which the capitalist mode of production emerges from a feudal society. As soon as he comes to analyze the capitalist process of production and circulation, he reaffirms the universal and exclusive domination of capitalist production.

Yet, as we have seen, capitalism in its full maturity also depends in all respects on non-capitalist strata and social organizations existing side by side with it. It is not merely a question of a market for the additional product, as Sismondi and the later critics and doubters of capitalist accumulation would have it. The interrelations of accumulating capital and non-capitalist forms of production extend over values as well as over material conditions, for constant capital, variable capital and surplus value alike. The non-capitalist mode of production is the given historical setting for this process. Since the accumulation of capital becomes impossible in all points without non-capitalist surroundings, we cannot gain a true picture of it by assuming the exclusive and absolute domination of the capitalist mode of production. Sismondi and his school, when they attributed their difficulties entirely to the problem of realizing the surplus value, indeed revealed a proper sense for the conditions vital to accumulation. Yet the conditions for augmenting the material elements of constant and variable capital are quite a different matter from those which govern the realization of surplus value. Capital needs the means of production and the labour power of the whole globe for untrammelled accumulation; it cannot manage without the natural resources and the labour power of all territories. Seeing that the overwhelming majority of resources and labour power is in fact still in the orbit of pre-capitalist production—this being the historical milieu of accumulation—capital must go all out to obtain ascendancy over these territories and social organizations. There is no a priori reason why rubber plantations, say, run on capitalist lines, such as have been laid out in India, might not serve the ends of capitalist production just as well. Yet if the countries of those branches of production are predominantly non-capitalist, capital will endeavour to establish domination over these countries and societies. And in fact, primitive conditions allow of a greater drive and of far more ruthless measures than could be tolerated under purely capitalist social conditions.

It is quite different with the realization of the surplus value. Here outside consumers qua other-than-capitalist are really essential. Thus the immediate and vital conditions for capital and its accumulation is the existence of non-capitalist buyers of the surplus value, which is decisive to this extent for the problem of capitalist accumulation.

Whatever the theoretical aspects, the accumulation of capital, as an historical process, depends in every respect upon non-capitalist social strata and forms of social organization.

The solution to this problem which for almost a century has been the bone of contention in economic theory thus lies between the two extremes of the petty-bourgeois scepticism preached by Sismondi, v. Kirchmann, Vorontsov and Nicolayon, who flatly denied accumulation, and the crude optimism advocated by Ricardo, Say and Tugan Baranovski who believed in capital’s unlimited capacity for parthenogenesis, with the logical corollary of capitalism-in-perpetuity. The solution envisaged by Marx lies in the dialectical conflict that capitalism needs non-capitalist social organizations as the setting for its development, that it proceeds by assimilating the very conditions which alone can ensure its own existence.

At this point we should revise the conceptions of internal and external markets which were so important in the controversy about accumulation. They are both vital to capitalist development and yet fundamentally different, though they must be conceived in terms of social economy rather than of political geography. In this light, the internal market is the capitalist market, production itself buying its own products and supplying its own elements of production. The external market is the non-capitalist social environment which absorbs the products of capitalism and supplies producer goods and labour power for capitalist production. Thus, from the point of view of economics, Germany and England traffic in commodities chiefly on an internal, capitalist market, whilst the give and take between German industry and German peasants is transacted on an external market as far as German capital is concerned. These concepts are strict and precise, as can be seen from the diagram of reproduction. Internal capitalist trade can at best realize only certain quantities of value contained in the social product: the constant capital that has been used up, the variable capital, and the consumed part of the surplus value. That part of the surplus value, however, which is earmarked for capitalization, must be realized elsewhere. If capitalization of surplus value is the real motive force and aim of production, it must yet proceed within the limits given by the renewal of constant and variable capital (and also of the consumed part of the surplus value). Further, with the international development of capitalism the capitalization of surplus value becomes ever more urgent and precarious, and the substratum of constant and variable capital becomes an ever-growing mass—both absolutely and in relation to the surplus value. Hence the contradictory phenomena that the old capitalist countries provide ever larger markets for, and become increasingly dependent upon, one another, yet on the other hand compete ever more ruthlessly for trade relations with non-capitalist countries.

The conditions for the capitalization of surplus value clash increasingly with the conditions for the renewal of the aggregate capital—a conflict which, incidentally, is merely a counterpart of the contradictions implied in the law of a declining profit rate.

CHAPTER XXXII MILITARISM AS A PROVINCE OF ACCUMULATION

Militarism fulfills a quite definite function in the history of capital, accompanying as it does every historical phase of accumulation. It plays a decisive part in the first stages of European capitalism, in the period of the so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, as a means of conquering the New World and the spice-producing countries of India. Later, it is employed to subject the modern colonies, to destroy the social organizations of primitive societies so that their means of production may be appropriated, forcibly to introduce commodity trade in countries where the social structure had been unfavourable to it, and to turn the natives into a proletariat by compelling them to work for wages in the colonies. It is responsible for the creation and expansion of spheres of interest for European capital in non-European regions, for extorting railway concessions in backward countries, and for enforcing the claims of European capital as international lender. Finally, militarism is a weapon in the competitive struggle between capitalist countries for areas of non-capitalist civilization.

In addition, militarism has yet another important function. From the purely economic point of view, it is a pre-eminent means for the realization of surplus value; it is in itself a province of accumulation. In examining the question who should count as a buyer for the mass of products containing the capitalized surplus value, we have again and again refused to consider the state and its organs as consumers. Since their income is derivative, they were all taken to belong to the special category of those who live on the surplus value (or partly on the wage of labour), together with the liberal professions and the various parasites of present-day society (‘king, professor, prostitute, mercenary’). But this interpretation will only do on two assumptions: first, if we take it, in accordance with Marx’s diagram, that the state has no other sources of taxation than capitalist surplus value and wages, and secondly, if we regard the state and its organs as consumers pure and simple. If the issue turns on the personal consumption of the state organs (as also of the ‘mercenary’) the point is that consumption is partly transferred from the working class to the hangers-on of the capitalist class, in so far as the workers foot the bill.

Let us assume for a moment that the indirect taxes extorted from the workers, which mean a curtailment of their consumption, are used entirely to pay the salaries of the state officials and to provision the regular army. There will then be no change in the reproduction of social capital as a whole. Both Departments II and I remain constant because society as a whole still demands the same kind of products and in the same quantities. Only v as the commodity of ‘labour power’ has changed in value in relation to the products of Department II, i.e. in relation to the means of subsistence. This v, the same amount of money representing labour power, is now exchanged for a smaller amount of means of subsistence. What happens to the products of Department II which are then left over? Instead of the workers, the state officials and the regular army now receive them. The organs of the capitalist state take over the workers’ consumption on the same scale exactly. Although the conditions of reproduction have remained stable, there has been a redistribution of the total product. Part of the products of Department II, originally intended entirely for the consumption of the workers as equivalent for v, is now allocated to the hangers-on of the capitalist class for consumption. From the point of view of social reproduction, it is as if the relative surplus value had in the first place been larger by a certain amount which is added on to the consumption of the capitalist class and its hangers-on.

So far the crude exploitation, by the mechanism of indirect taxation, of the working class for the support of the capitalist state’s officials amounts merely to an increase of the surplus value, of that part of it, that is to say, which is consumed. The difference is that this further splitting off of surplus value from variable capital only comes later, after the exchange between capital and labour has been accomplished. But the consumption by the organs of the capitalist state has no bearing on the realization of capitalized surplus value, because the additional surplus value for this consumption—even though it comes about at the workers’ expense—is created afterwards. On the other hand, if the workers did not pay for the greater part of the state officials’ upkeep, the capitalists themselves would have to bear the entire cost of it. A corresponding portion of their surplus value would have to be assigned directly to keeping the organs of their class-rule, either at the expense of production which would have to be curtailed accordingly, or, which is more probable, it would come from the surplus value intended for their consumption. The capitalists would have to capitalize on a smaller scale because of having to contribute more towards the immediate preservation of their own class. In so far as they shift onto the working class (and also the representatives of simple commodity production, such as peasants and artisans) the principal charge of their hangers-on, the capitalists have a larger portion of surplus value available for capitalization. But as yet no opportunities for such capitalization have come into being, no new market, that is to say, for the surplus value that has become available, in which it could produce and realize new commodities. But when the monies concentrated in the exchequer by taxation are used for the production of armaments, the picture is changed.

With indirect taxation and high protective tariffs, the bill of militarism is footed mainly by the working class and the peasants. The two kinds of taxation must be considered separately. From an economic point of view, it amounts to the following, as far as the working class is concerned: provided that wages are not raised to make up for the higher price of foodstuffs—which is at present the fate of the greatest part of the working class, including even the minority that is organized in trade unions, owing to the pressure of cartels and employers’ organizations—indirect taxation means that part of the purchasing power of the working class is transferred to the state. Now as before the variable capital, as a fixed amount of money, will put in motion an appropriate quantity of living labour, that is to say it serves to employ the appropriate quantity of constant capital in production and to produce the corresponding amount of surplus value. As soon as capital has completed this cycle, it is divided between the working class and the state: the workers surrender the state part of the money they received as wages. Capital has wholly appropriated the former variable capital in its material form, as labour power, but the working class retains only part of the variable capital in the form of money, the state claiming the rest. And this invariably happens after capital has run its cycle between capitalist and worker; it takes place, as it were, behind the back of capital, at no point impinging direct on the vital stages of the circulation of capital and the production of surplus value, so that it is no immediate concern of the latter. But all the same it does affect the conditions for the reproduction of capital as a whole. The transfer of some of the purchasing power from the working class to the state entails a proportionate decrease in the consumption of means of subsistence by the working class. For capital as a whole, it means producing a smaller quantity of consumer goods for the working class, provided that both variable capital (in the form of money and as labour power) and the mass of appropriated surplus value remain constant, so that the workers get a smaller share of the aggregate product. In the process of reproduction of the entire capital, then, means of subsistence will be produced in amounts smaller than the value of the variable capital, because of the shift in the ratio between the value of the variable capital and the quantity of means of subsistence in which it is realized, with the money wages of labour remaining constant, according to our premise, or at any rate not rising sufficiently to offset the increase in the price of foodstuffs. This increase represents the level of indirect taxation.

How will the material relations of reproduction be adjusted? When fewer means of subsistence are needed for the renewal of labour power, a corresponding amount of constant capital and living labour becomes available which can now be used for producing other commodities in response to a new effective demand arising within society. It arises from the side of the state which has appropriated, by way of tax legislation, the part wanting of the workers’ purchasing power. This time, however, the state does not demand means of subsistence (after all that has already been said under the heading of ‘third persons’, we shall here ignore the demand for means of subsistence for state officials which is also satisfied out of taxes) but it requires a special kind of product, namely the militarist weapons of war on land and at sea.

Again we take Marx’s second diagram of accumulation as the basis for investigating the ensuing changes in social reproduction:

Now let us suppose that, owing to indirect taxation and the consequent increase in the price of means of subsistence, the working class as a whole reduces consumption by, say, a 100 value units of the real wages. As before, the workers receive 1,000v + 285v = 1,285v in money, but for this money they only get means of subsistence to the value of 1185. The 100 units which represent the tax increase in the price of foodstuffs go to the state which receives in addition military taxes from the peasants, etc., to the value of 150 units, bringing the total up to 250. This total constitutes a new demand—the demand for armaments. At present, however, we are only interested in the 100 units taken from the workers’ wages. This demand for armaments to the value of 100 must be satisfied by the creation of an appropriate branch of production which requires a constant capital of 71·5 and a variable capital of 14·25, assuming the average organic composition outlined in Marx’s diagram.

This new branch of production further requires that 71·5 means of production be produced and about 13 means of subsistence, because, of course, the real wages of the workers are also less by about one-thirteenth.

You could counter by saying that the profit accruing to capital from this new expansion of demand is merely on paper, because the cut in the actual consumption of the working class will inevitably result in a corresponding curtailment of the means of subsistence produced. It will take the following form for Department II:

In addition, Department I will also have to contract accordingly, so that, owing to the decreasing consumption of the working class, the equations for both departments will be:

If, by the mediation of the state, the same 100 units now call forth armament production of an equal volume with a corresponding fillip to the production of producer goods, this is at first sight only an extraneous change in the material forms of social production: instead of a quantity of means of subsistence a quantity of armaments is now being produced. Capital has won with the left hand only what it has lost with the right. Or we might say that the large number of capitalists producing means of subsistence have lost the effective demand in favour of a small group of big armament manufacturers.

But this picture is only valid for individual capital. Here it makes no difference indeed whether production engages in one sphere of activity or another. As far as the individual capitalist is concerned, there are no departments of total production such as the diagram distinguishes. There are only commodities and buyers, and it is completely immaterial to him whether he produces instruments of life or instruments of death, corned beef or armour plating.

Opponents of militarism frequently appeal to this point view to show that military supplies as an economic investment for capital merely put profit taken from one capitalist into the pocket of another.  On the other hand, capital and its advocates try to overpersuade the working class to this point of view by talking them into the belief that indirect taxes and the demand of the state would only bring about a change in the material form of reproduction; instead of other commodities cruisers and guns would be produced which would give the workers as good a living, if not a better one.

One glance at the diagram shows how little truth there is in this argument as far as the workers are concerned. To make comparison easier, we will suppose the armament factories to employ just as many workers as were employed before in the production of means of subsistence for the working class. 1,285 units will then be paid out as wages, but now they will only buy 1,185’s worth of means of subsistence.

All this looks different from the perspective of capital as a whole. For this the 100 at the disposal of the state, which represent the demand for armaments, constitute a new market. Originally this money was variable capital and as such it has done its job, it has been exchanged for living labour which produced the surplus value. But then the circulation of the variable capital was stopped short, this money was split off, and it now appears as a new purchasing power in the possession of the state. It has been created by sleight of hand, as it were, but still it has the same effects as a newly opened market. Of course for the time being capital is debarred from selling 100 units of consumer goods for the working class, and the individual capitalist considers the worker just as good a consumer and buyer of commodities as anyone else, another capitalist, the state, the peasant, foreign countries, etc. But let us not forget that for capital as a whole the upkeep of the working class is only a necessary evil, only a means towards the real end of production: the creation and realization of surplus value. If it were possible to extort surplus value without giving labour an equal measure of means of subsistence, it would be all the better for business. To begin with indirect taxation has the same effects as if—the price of foodstuffs remaining constant—the capitalists had succeeded in depressing wages by a hundred units without detracting from the work performed, seeing that a lower output of consumer goods is equally the inevitable result of continuous wage cuts. If wages are cut heavily, capital does not worry about having to produce fewer means of subsistence for the workers, in fact it delights in this practice at every opportunity; similarly, capital as a whole does not mind if the effective demand of the working class for means of subsistence is curtailed because of indirect taxation which is not compensated by a rise in wages. This may seem strange because in the latter case the balance of the variable capital goes to the exchequer, while with a direct wage cut it remains in the capitalists’ pockets and—commodity prices remaining equal—increases the relative surplus value. But a continuous and universal reduction of money wages can only be carried through on rare occasions, especially if trade union organization is highly developed. There are strong social and political barriers to this fond aspiration of capital. Depression of the real wage by means of indirect taxation, on the other hand, can be carried through promptly, smoothly and universally, and it usually takes time for protests to be heard; and besides, the opposition is confined to the political field and has no immediate economic repercussions. The subsequent restriction in the production of means of subsistence does not represent a loss of markets for capital as a whole but rather a saving in the costs of producing surplus value. Surplus value is never realized by producing means of subsistence for the workers—however necessary this may be, as the reproduction of living labour, for the production of surplus value.

But to come back to our example:

At first it looks as if Department II were also creating and realizing surplus value in the process of producing means of subsistence for the workers, and Department I by producing the requisite means of production. But if we take the social product as a whole, the illusion disappears. The equation is in that case:

Now, if the means of subsistence for the workers are cut by 100 units, the corresponding contraction of both departments will give us the following equations:

and for the social product as a whole:

This looks like a general decrease in both the total volume of production and in the production of surplus value—but only if we contemplate just the abstract quantities of value in the composition of the total product; it does not hold good for the material composition thereof. Looking closer, we find that nothing but the upkeep of labour is in effect decreased. Fewer means of subsistence and production are now being made, no doubt, but then, they had had no other function save to maintain workers. The social product is smaller and less capital is now employed—but then, the object of capitalist production is not simply to employ as much capital as possible, but to produce as much surplus value as possible. Capital has only decreased because a smaller amount is sufficient for maintaining the workers. If the total cost of maintaining the workers employed in the society came to 1,285 units in the first instance, the present decrease of the social product by 171·5—the difference of (9,000-8,828·5)—comes off this maintenance charge, and there is a consequent change in the composition of the social product:

Constant capital and surplus value remain unchanged, and only the variable capital, paid labour, has diminished. Or—in case there are doubts about constant capital being unaffected—we may further allow for the event that, as would happen in actual practice, concomitant with the decrease in means of subsistence for the workers there will be a corresponding cut in the constant capital. The equation for the social product as a whole would then be:

In spite of the smaller social product, there is no change in the surplus value in either case, and it is only the cost of maintaining the workers that has fallen.

Put it this way: the value of the aggregate social product may be defined as consisting of three parts, the total constant capital of the society, its total variable capital, and its total surplus value, of which the first set of products contains no additional labour, and the second and third no means of production. As regards their material form, all these products come into being in the given period of production—though in point of value the constant capital had been produced in a previous period and is merely being transferred to new products. On this basis, we can also divide all the workers employed into three mutually exclusive categories: those who produce the aggregate constant capital of the society, those who provide the upkeep for all the workers, and finally those who create the entire surplus value for the capitalist class.

If, then, the workers’ consumption is curtailed, only workers in the second category will lose their jobs. Ex hypothesi, these workers had never created surplus value for capital, and in consequence their dismissal is therefore no loss from the capitalist’s point of view but a gain, since it decreases the cost of producing surplus value.

The demand of the state which arises at the same time has the lure of a new and attractive sphere for realizing the surplus value. Some of the money circulating as variable capital breaks free of this cycle and in the state treasury it represents a new demand. For the technique of taxation, of course, the order of events is rather different, since the amount of the indirect taxes is actually advanced to the state by capital and is merely being refunded to the capitalists by the sale of their commodities, as part of their price. But economically speaking, it makes no difference. The crucial point is that the quantity of money with the function of variable capital should first mediate the exchange between capital and labour power. Later, when there is an exchange between workers and capitalists as buyers and sellers of commodities respectively, this money will change hands and accrue to the state as taxes. This money, which capital has set circulating, first fulfills its primary function in the exchange with labour power, but subsequently, by mediation of the state, it begins an entirely new career. As a new purchasing power, belonging with neither labour nor capital, it becomes interested in new products, in a special branch of production which does not cater for either the capitalists or the working class, and thus it offers capital new opportunities for creating and realizing surplus value. When we were formerly taking it for granted that the indirect taxes extorted from the workers are used for paying the officials and for provisioning the army, we found the ‘saving’ in the consumption of the working class to mean that the workers rather than the capitalists were made to pay for the personal consumption of the hangers-on of the capitalist class and the tools of their class-rule. This charge devolved from the surplus value to the variable capital, and a corresponding amount of the surplus value became available for purposes of capitalization. Now we see how the taxes extorted from the workers afford capital a new opportunity for accumulation when they are used for armament manufacture.

On the basis of indirect taxation, militarism in practice works both ways. By lowering the normal standard of living for the working class, it ensures both that capital should be able to maintain a regular army, the organ of capitalist rule, and that it may tap an impressive field for further accumulation.

We have still to examine the second source of the state’s purchasing power referred to in our example, the 150 units out of the total 250 invested in armaments. They differ essentially from the hundred units considered above in that they are not supplied by the workers but by the petty bourgeoisie, i.e. the artisans and peasants. (In this connection, we can ignore the comparatively small tax-contribution of the capitalist class itself.)

The money accruing to the state as taxes from the peasant masses—as our generic term for all non-proletarian consumers—was not originally advanced by capital and has not split off from capital in circulation. In the hand of the peasant it is the equivalent of goods that have been realized, the exchange value of simple commodity production. The state now gets part of the purchasing power of the non-capitalist consumers, purchasing power, that is to say, which is already free to realize the surplus value for capitalist accumulation. Now the question arises, whether economic changes will result for capital, and if so, of what nature, from diverting the purchasing power of such strata to the state for militarist purposes. It almost looks as if we had come up against yet another shift in the material form of reproduction. Capital will now produce an equivalent of war materials for the state instead of producing large quantities of means of production and subsistence for peasant consumers. But in fact the changes go deeper. First and foremost, the state can use the mechanism of taxation to mobilize much larger amounts of purchasing power from the non-capitalist consumers than they would ordinarily spend on their own consumption.

Indeed the modern system of taxation itself is largely responsible for forcing commodity economy on the peasants. Under pressure of taxes, the peasant must turn more and more of his produce into commodities, and at the same time he must buy more and more. Taxation presses the produce of peasant economy into circulation and compels the peasants to become buyers of capitalist products. Finally, on a basis of commodity production in the peasant style, the system of taxation lures more purchasing power from peasant economy than would otherwise become active.

What would normally have been hoarded by the peasants and the lower middle classes until it has grown big enough to invest in savings banks and other banks is now set free to constitute an effective demand and an opportunity for investment. Further the multitude of individual and insignificant demands for a whole range of commodities, which will become effective at different times and which might often be met just as well by simple commodity production, is now replaced by a comprehensive and homogeneous demand of the state. And the satisfaction of this demand presupposes a big industry of the highest order. It requires the most favourable conditions for the production of surplus value and for accumulation. In the form of government contracts for army supplies the scattered purchasing power of the consumers is concentrated in large quantities and, free of the vagaries and subjective fluctuations of personal consumption, it achieves an almost automatic regularity and rhythmic growth. Capital itself ultimately controls this automatic and rhythmic movement of militarist production through the legislature and a press whose function is to mold so-called ‘public opinion’. That is why this particular province of capitalist accumulation at first seems capable of infinite expansion. All other attempts to expand markets and set up operational bases for capital largely depend on historical, social and political factors beyond the control of capital, whereas production for militarism represents a province whose regular and progressive expansion seems primarily determined by capital itself.

In this way capital turns historical necessity into a virtue: the ever fiercer competition in the capitalist world itself provides a field for accumulation of the first magnitude. Capital increasingly employs militarism for implementing a foreign and colonial policy to get hold of the means of production and labour power of non-capitalist countries and societies. This same militarism works in a like manner in the capitalist countries to divert purchasing power away from the non-capitalist strata.

The representatives of simple commodity production and the working class are affected alike in this way. At their expense, the accumulation of capital is raised to the highest power, by robbing the one of their productive forces and by depressing the other’s standard of living. Needless to say, after a certain stage the conditions for the accumulation of capital both at home and abroad turn into their very opposite—they become conditions for the decline of capitalism.

The more ruthlessly capital sets about the destruction of non-capitalist strata at home and in the outside world, the more it lowers the standard of living for the workers as a whole, the greater also is the change in the day-to-day history of capital. It becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions, and under these conditions, punctuated by periodical economic catastrophes or crises, accumulation can go on no longer.

But even before this natural economic impasse of capital’s own creating is properly reached it becomes a necessity for the international working class to revolt against the rule of capital.

Capitalism is the first mode of economy with the weapon of propaganda, a mode which tends to engulf the entire globe and to stamp out all other economies, tolerating no rival at its side. Yet at the same time it is also the first mode of economy which is unable to exist by itself, which needs other economic systems as a medium and soil. Although it strives to become universal, and, indeed, on account of this its tendency, it must break down—because it is immanently incapable of becoming a universal form of production. In its living history it is a contradiction in itself, and its movement of accumulation provides a solution to the conflict and aggravates it at the same time. At a certain stage of development there will be no other way out than the application of socialist principles. The aim of socialism is not accumulation but the satisfaction of toiling humanity’s wants by developing the productive forces of the entire globe. And so we find that socialism is by its very nature an harmonious and universal system of economy. [9]

Port Huron Statement 1962

Ideas to explore: What was happening in the United States during this period, 1962?  What was happening politically and socially in the U.S.?  What was U.S. foreign policy during this period?  Why don’t students today in the U.S. commit themselves to a cause?  The process to democratize Serbia in 1999-2001 was driven by a student movement called Otpor.  The Arab Spring was driven by the younger generation in many parts of the world.  In 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests were driven by the young and supported by various demographics.  These protests had a contagion global effect in Chile, Iran, Russia, India, among other places.  What could motivate another wave of action in the United States?

The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

Introduction: Agenda for a Generation

Every generation inherits from the past a set of problems—personal and social—and a dominant set of insights and perspectives by which the problems are to be understood and, hopefully, managed. The critical feature of this generation’s inheritance is that the problems are so serious as to actually threaten civilization, while the conventional perspectives are of dubious worth. Horrors are regarded as commonplace; we take universal strife in stride; we treat newness with a normalcy that suggests a deliberate flight from reality.

How can the magnitude of modern problems be best expressed? Perhaps by means of paradox:

With nuclear energy whole cities could easily be powered, but instead we seem likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars in human history;

With rockets we are emancipating man from terrestrial limitations, but from Mississippi jails still comes the prayer for emancipation of man on earth;

As man’s own technology destroys old and creates new forms of social organization, man still tolerates meaningless work, idleness instead of creative leisure, and educational systems that do not prepare him for life amidst change;

While expanding networks of communication, transportation, integrating economic systems, and the birth of intercontinental missiles make national boundaries utterly permeable and antiquated, men still fight and hate in provincial loyalty to nationalism;

While two-thirds of mankind suffers increasing undernourishment, our upper classes are changing from competition for scarce goods to reveling amidst abundance;

With world population expected to double in forty years, men still permit anarchy as the rule of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation to govern the sapping of the earth’s physical resources;

Mankind desperately needs visionary and revolutionary leadership to respond to its enormous and deeply-entrenched problems. But America rests in national stalemate, her goals ambiguous and tradition-bound when they should be new and far-reaching, her democracy apathetic and manipulated when it should be dynamic and participative.

These paradoxes convey tensions which demand the attention of every individual concerned with the future condition of man. The newness of them demands intellectual self-reliance from a younger generation that fears to be its own leadership. The complexity of them requires a radical sense of appreciation, of facts and values, that few thinkers want to undertake. The dangers in them, that this is the first generation to know it might be the last in the long experiment at living, call not for detachment and retreat but for humility and initiative, not for hypnotic adoption of the politics of past and ranking orders, but for reflective working out of a politics anew.

We are people of this generation, in our late teens and early- or mid-twenties, bred in affluence, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

We are dismayed by the timidity of our elders and the privatism of our peers. The organizations we know, in which we are to be socialized as citizens, are unradical, in that they treat only of symptoms, not roots, or unpolitical, in that they are impelled more by outrage and static protest than measured analysis and assertive program, or simply hesitant, skirting the issues and blurring them with rhetoric, rather than admitting of problems both intellectual and political and nevertheless seeking a broad analysis of social issues.

We write, debate, and assert this manifesto, not as a declaration that we have the Final Cure, but to affirm that problems must be faced with an expression of knowledge and value, and in action. In this affirmation we deny that problems can be faced by claiming they don’t exist anymore, or that the government through expertise will solve what problems there are.

We do this as a basis for an organization, because as students we feel that only as we find some structured way of working together, sharing ideas, formulating program and engaging in action will the left become visible and responsible in America.

Our form is tentative—it will change as a response to growth, as we extend beyond our own age group—as we find ways to work with those whom the academic structure identifies as our teachers, as bridges can be extended to labor, the church, the liberal reform and socialist political groups, as we form the necessary amalgamations with other liberal and radical centers on the campus and beyond.

Our goal is to stimulate a left—new and, we think, young.

We seek to be public, responsible, and influential—not housed in garrets, lunatic, and ineffectual; to be visionary yet ever developing concrete programs—not empty or deluded in our goals and sterile in inaction; to be idealistic and hopeful—not deadened by failures or chained by a myopic view of human possibilities; to be both passionate and reflective—not timid and intellectually paralytic; to vivify American politics with controversy—not to emasculate our principles before the icons of unity and bipartisanship; to stimulate and give honor to the full movement of human imagination—not to induce sectarian rigidity or encourage stereotyped rhetoric.

On this basis we offer this document: as an effort in understanding the new, but an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man as a being struggling for determining influence over his circumstances. That man should creatively encounter the forces, new and old, challenging his reason and menacing his freedom, is the hope underlying this paper, which is our beginning—in argument, in identifying friends and opponents, and most essentially in carrying on our own education—as democrats in a time of upheaval.

The Students

In the last few years, thousands of American students demonstrated that they at least felt the urgency of the times. They moved actively and directly against racial injustices, the threat of war, violations of individual rights of conscience and, less frequently, against economic manipulation. They succeeded in restoring a small measure of controversy to the campuses after the stillness of the McCarthy period.

They succeeded, too, in gaining some concessions from the people and institutions they opposed, especially in the fight against racial bigotry.

The significance of these scattered “movements” lies not in their success or failure in gaining objectives—at least not yet. Nor does the significance lie in the intellectual “competence” or “maturity” of the students involved—as some pedantic elders allege. The significance is in the fact that the students are breaking the crust of apathy and overcoming the inner alienation that remain the defining characteristics of American college life.

In truth, student movements for reform are rarities on the campus. What is commonplace on the campus? How do “apathy” and “inner alienation” manifest themselves? The real campus, the familiar campus, is a place of private people, engaged in their notorious “inner emigration”. It is a place of commitment to business-as-usual, getting ahead, playing it cool. It is a place of mass affirmation of the Twist, but mass reluctance toward the controversial public stance. Rules are accepted as “inevitable”, bureaucracy as “just circumstances”, irrelevance as “scholarship”, selflessness as “martyrdom”, politics as “Just another try to make people, and an unprofitable one, too”.

According to recent studies, almost no students value being active as a citizen. Passive in public, they are hardly more idealistic in arranging their private lives: Gallup concludes they will “settle for low success and won’t risk high failure.” There is not much willingness to take risks (not even in business), no setting of dangerous goals, no real conception of personal identity except one made in the image of others, no real urge for personal fulfillment except to be almost as successful as the very successful people. Attention is paid to social status, the quality of shirt collars, meeting people, getting wives or husbands, making solid contacts for later on); much, too, is paid to academic status (grades, honors, the med school rat race).

Neglected generally is the intellectual status, the personal cultivation of excellence of the mind.

“Students don’t even give a damn about the apathy”, one of us has said. Apathy toward apathy begets a privately constructed universe, a place of systematic study schedules, two nights a week for beer, a girl or two, and early marriage; a framework infused with personality, warmth and under control, no matter how unsatisfying it may be.

Under these conditions, university life loses all relevance to some. Four hundred thousand of us leave college every year.

But apathy and alienation are not simply attitudes; they are products of our social institutions, of the structure and organization of higher education. The extracurricular life is ordered according to in loco parentis theory, which ratifies the Administration as the moral guardian of the young. The accompanying “let’s pretend” theory of student extra-curricular affairs transforms student “government” into a training center for those who want to spend their lives pretending politically, and discourages initiative from more articulate, honest, and sensitive students. The bounds and style of controversy are delimited before controversy begins. The university “prepares” the student for “citizenship” through perpetual rehearsals and, usually, through evisceration of what creative spirit there is in the individual.

The academic life contains reinforcing counterparts to the way in which extracurricular life is organized. The academic world is founded in a teacher-student relation analogous to the parent-child relation which characterizes in loco parentis. Further, academic life is founded in a radical separation of student from the “object” he studies. That which is studied, the social reality, is “objectified”, theory divorced from the stuff of practice, the unity of human understanding submitted to compartmentalizing, specializing, and the quest for little questions. Thus is the student divided from life by his professor, as the anxious administrator attempts to do through in loco parentis.

The academic bureaucracy—the administrators and their pervading systems—extends throughout the academic and extracurricular structures, contributing to the sense of outer complexity and inner powerlessness that transforms so many students from honest searching to ratification of convention and, worse, to a numbness to present and future catastrophes.

Almost invisibly, too, huge foundations and other private financial interests shape the money-hungry universities, making them more commercial, less disposed to diagnose society critically, less open to dissent. Defense contracts, too, bring many universities into tacit cooperation with the interests supporting the arms race. In summary, the actual intellectual effect of the college experience on the student is barely distinguishable from that of any other communications channel—say, a television set—passing on the stock truths of the day. Students leave college more “tolerant” than others, but basically unchanged in their values and political orientations. This is unsurprising, since the real function of the educational system—as opposed to its more rhetorical function of “searching for truth”—is to impart the key information and styles that will help student get by, modestly but comfortably, in the big society beyond.

Look beyond the campus, to America itself. That student life is more intellectual, and perhaps more comfortable, does not obscure the fact that the fundamental qualities of life on the campus reflects the habits of society at large. The fraternity president is seen at the junior manager levels; the sorority queen has gone to Grosse Pointe; the serious poet burns hopelessly for a place, any place, to work; the once-serious and never-serious poets are at the advertising agencies or the slick magazines. The desperation of people threatened by forces about which they know little and of which they can say less; the cheerful emptiness of people forced to close their identities to modern stress; the hostile surrender of people “giving up” all hope of changing things; the faceless polled by Gallup who listed “international affairs” fourteenth on their list of “problems”, but also expected thermonuclear war in the next few years; in these and other forms, Americans are in withdrawal from public life, from any collective effort at directing their own affairs.

Some regard this national doldrums as a sign of healthy approval of the established order—but is it approval by consent or manipulated acquiescence? Others declare that the people are withdrawn because compelling issues are fast disappearing—perhaps there are fewer breadlines in America, but is Jim Crow gone, is there enough work and work more fulfilling, is world war a diminishing threat, and what of the new peoples and their aspirations? Still others think that the national quietude is a necessary consequence of the need for elites to resolve complex and specialized problems of modern industrial society—but, then, why should business elites decide foreign policy, and who controls the elites anyway, and are they solving mankind’s problems? Others, finally, shrug knowingly and announce that full democracy never worked anywhere in the past—but why lump qualitatively different civilizations together, and how can a social order work well if its best thinkers are skeptics, and is man really doomed forever to the domination of today?

There are no convincing apologies for the contemporary malaise. While the world tumbles toward the final war, while men in other nations are trying desperately to alter events, while the very future qua future is uncertain—America is without community impulse, with the inner momentum necessary for an age when societies cannot successfully perpetuate themselves by their military weapons, when democracy must be viable because of its quality of life, not its quantity of rockets.

The apathy here is, first, subjective—the felt powerlessness of ordinary people, the resignation before enormity of events. But subjective apathy is encouraged by the objective American situation—the actual structural separation of people from power, from relevant knowledge, from the pinnacles of decision-making. Just as the university influences the student way of life, so do major social institutions create the circumstances in which the isolated citizen will try helplessly to understand his world and himself.

The very isolation of the individual—from power and community and ability to aspire—means the rise of a democracy without publics. With the great mass of people structurally remote and psychologically hesitant with respect to democratic institutions, those institutions themselves attenuate and become, in the fashion of the vicious circle, progressively less accessible to those few who aspire to serious participation in social affairs. The vital democratic connection between community and leadership, between the mass and the several elites, has been so wrenched and perverted that disastrous policies go unchallenged time and again.

American Politics

Historically and currently, American politics are built on a desire to deploy and neutralize the “evil drives” of men. Paradoxically, they have instead tended to diminish general interest in citizenship and have encouraged the consolidation of irresponsibility at higher levels of government. Politics today are organized for policy paralysis and minority domination, not for fluid change and mass participation. The major parties contain broader differences within them than between themselves. What exists instead of two parties an undeclared “third party” alliance of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans, blessed by a seniority system that guarantees Congressional committee domination to conservatives (10 of 17 committees in the Senate and 13 of 21 in the House are currently chaired by Southern Democrats). For one hundred years the going bargain has given he liberals the Presidency, the conservatives the Congress, and the general public a system of unrepresentative government. Confusion necessarily is built into political discussion. Relevant issues are not raised and debated in a way that affords the voter a genuine political choice: politics of personality transcends the politics of issues. Calcification (under the name of “responsible progress with stability”) dominates flexibility as the principle of parliamentary organization. Frustration is the expectancy of legislators intending serious liberal reform. In a world demanding rapid change, Congress becomes less and less central in American decision-making — in foreign policy Congress has but a minor role since World War II.

Outside of Congress, the parties view themselves not as vehicles for debate but as machines seeking power, not as outlets for individual work but as dispensers of rewards and elevators to status. But politics go beyond congressional inflexibility and party power lust. Involved, too, is the expanding force of lobbyists, predominantly representing business interests, spending hundreds of millions annually in a systematic effort to conform facts about our productivity, our agriculture, our defense, our social services, to the interests of private economic groupings.

In this contest of organized stalemate, party contradictions, insulated power and privilege, and deliberate falsifications, the most alarming fact is that few, if any, politicians are calling for a change. Rather than protesting conditions, the politicians aggravate them in several ways.

While in practice they go about rigging public opinion to their own interests, in word and ritual they enshrine “the sovereign public.” Their speeches and campaign actions are banal, based in a degrading conception of what people want to hear. They respond not to dialogue, but to pressure: and knowing this, the ordinary citizen feels even greater powerlessness. Perhaps the most criminal of political acts is the trumpeted appeal to “citizenship” and “service to the nation” which, since it is not meant to really rearrange power relations, only increases apathy by opening no creative outlet for real citizenship. Often, too, the appeal to “service” is justified not in terms of idealism, but in the crasser terms of “defending the Free World from Communism”—thus making future idealistic impulses impossible to justify in any but Cold War terms.

The Economy

American economic life is not as it once was. Capitalism today advertises itself as the Welfare State. Ours is the first generation to comfortably expect pensions, medical care, unemployment compensations, and other social services throughout our lives. In many places, workers need not experience the sweatshop conditions of the Thirties, the unrepaired machines, the unrestrained bosses. Most of our top unionists have assumed the roles and rhetoric of business leaders—a requisite of good bargaining, of course. Although our productive capacity is one-fourth idle, two-thirds of all Americans make enough to live in utter comfort, were it not for the nagging incentive to “keep up”. As they say, we are “making it pretty well”.

But we are younger, raised in the Boom of World War II. We take for granted the existence and desirability of the New Deal reforms, and we look with anger at the legacies, the unfinished reforms, of our liberal ancestors.

The American economy, moreso than the political structure, is organized so that the individual “unit”, the consumer, is systematically excluded from the decisions affecting the nature of his work, his rewards, his economic opportunities. The modern concentration of corporate wealth is fantastic. The wealthiest one percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of all personal shares of stock. From World War II until the mid-Fifties, the 50 biggest corporations increased their share of manufacturing production from 17 to 23 percent of the national total, and the share of the largest 200 companies rose from 30 to 37 percent. Profits rise inexorably: United States Steel shipped half a million fewer tons of steel in 1957 than 1956, yet earned $419 million in net profits against the $348 million of the year before—even after suffering a strike and a grant of $180 million to the steelworkers in new wages!

To think that the decisions of these economic elites affect merely economic growth is delusion: their “economic” decisions affect all facets of social development. Foreign investments influence political policies in underdeveloped areas. The drive for sales spurs phenomenal advertising efforts: the “ethical drug” industry spent more than $750 million on promotions in 1960, nearly four times the total amount available to all American medical schools for their educational programs. The arts are organized considerably according to their commercial profitability. The tendency to over-production, to commodity gluts, requires the deliberate creation of pseudo-needs in consumers, and introduces inherently wasteful “planned obsolescence” as a permanent feature of business strategy.*

*Statistics on wealth reveal the “have” and “have not” gap at home. Only 5 percent of all those in the “$5,000 or less” bracket own any stock at all. In 1953, personally-owned wealth in the U.S. stood at $1 trillion. Of this sum, $309.2 billion (30.2 percent) was owned by 1,659,000 top wealth-holders (with incomes of $60,000 or more). This elite comprised l.04 percent of the population. Their average gross estate estimate was $182,000, as against the national average of $10,000. They held 80 percent of all corporation stock, virtually all state and local bonds, and between 10 and 33 percent of other types of property: bonds, real estate, mortgages, life insurance, unincorporated businesses, and cash. They receive 40 percent of property, income-rent, interest, dividends. The size of this elite has been relatively constant: 31.6%(1922) 30.6%(1939) 29.8%(1949) 30.2%(1958).

Within existing arrangements, the American business community cannot be said to encourage a democratic process nationally. Economic minorities not responsible to a public in any democratic fashion, make decisions of more profound social importance than even those made by Congress. The only influence that an individual can exert upon these corporate giants is by means of Congressional regulatory and investigating committees—whose powers are palliative, not preventative, and notoriously ineffective. American Telephone and Telegraph is an ideal example of both tendencies, that of irresponsible exercise of power and ineffective means of control. To protect its investments in existing facilities, A.T.&T. prevented the public use of one-piece telephones, modern switching equipment, and dial phones long after such modern instruments were developed: nothing could be done to hasten the public use of the new equipment until such use was profitable to the corporation. Further the Federal Communications Commission negotiated a 6.5 percent increase in returns on phone rates with A.T.&T. in 1953 that has been consistently surpassed every year, resulting in an “overcharge” of $985 million to the American public.

In this situation, work is undertaken to fulfill desperate needs, for status or material goods, or both. Work is accepted for ulterior reasons, rarely for intrinsic qualities, its creative possibilities. In work the individual is regulated as part of the system. In leisure he is regulated as a consumer, the lifelong target of hard-sell, soft-sell, lies and partial truths, appeals to his basest drives, always being told what he is supposed to like while being told, too, that he is a “free” man because of “free” enterprise. Thinking they follow the dictates of their own taste, men revel as consumers of things, centering their lives around a worship of things created rather than a reverence for the process of creation itself.

For all its debasing features, this condition is quite tolerable in comparison to the human misery which prevails, nearly unseen, just beyond the neon lights of modern affluence. At least 35 million people live beneath the levels of minimum subsistence in America, beyond the rehabilitating influence of the Welfare State which is only structured to meet the needs of the lower-middle classes, not of the truly desperate.

Whether newcomers or social remnants who were not upgraded by the New Deal reforms, these are the “leftovers” of society, lacking significant union or political expression, becoming more obsolete with each technological advance. When “bad breaks” come for the American poor, they come in plural and debilitating ways: substandard housing, poor health, unpleasant neighborhoods, broken families, bad schools, unemployment, the grinding plague of automation, inadequate retraining programs, social uprooting: all combine to kill personal aspirations.

In the midst of these conditions, the labor movement, historic spokesman for the exploited, is locked in growing inner crisis and outer lack of direction. To the American newspaper audience, “Big Labor” is a growing cancer that is at least equally evil as Big Business. Nothing could be more distorted (and more of a tribute to the opinion-manipulating skills of businessmen). To be sure, some unions are bigger than they were in the past. But the biggest of them are far smaller than the corporations they are supposed to countervail in the “free economy”: compare the auto workers to General Motors, the steelworkers to U.S. Steel, the communications workers to A.T.&T., the oil workers to Standard Oil. These enormous disparities still fail to give the accurate picture of the modern crisis of labor, however. First, the expectations of the newborn AFL-CIO of thirty million members by 1965 are suffering a reverse unimagined five years ago. The collapse of the dream of “organizing the unorganized” is dramatically reflected in the AFL-CIO decision, just two years after its creation, to slash its organizing staff in half. From 15 million members when the AFL and CIO merged, the total has slipped to 13.5 million.

During the post war generation, union membership nationally has increased by four million—but the total labor force has jumped by 13 million. Today only 30 percent of all nonagricultural workers are protected by organization. Second, organizing conditions are going to worsen. Where labor is strongest—in industries, for example—automation is leading to an attrition of available jobs. As the number of jobs dwindles, so too does labor’s power of bargaining, since management can more easily handle a strike in an automated plant than in the old, humanly-controlled ones. In addition, the American economy has changed radically in the last decade: suddenly the number of workers producing goods became fewer than the number in the “unproductive” areas—government, trade, finance, services, utilities, transportation. Since World War II “white collar” and “service” jobs have grown twice as fast as have “blue collar” production jobs. Labor has almost no organization in the expanding occupational areas of the new economy, almost all its entrenched strength in contracting areas. As big government hires more and more, as big business seeks more office workers and skilled technicians, and as growing commercial America demands new hotels, service stations and the like, the conditions will become graver still. Further, there is little indication that the South is ripe for labor organization. Finally, there is considerable indication that big business, for the sake of public relations, has acknowledged labor’s right to exist, but has deliberately and successfully tried to contain labor to its present strength, preventing strong unions from helping weaker ones, or from spreading to unorganized sectors of the economy. Business is aided in its efforts by a proliferation of “right-to-work” laws at the state level, anti-labor legislation (the Landrum-Griffin bill) in Congress.

But along with all these developments, labor itself—as an historical agency of change—is faced with a crisis of vision. It is the most liberal “mainstream” institution in modern America—but its liberalism is not much extended beyond its immediate self-interest, e.g. housing, favorable labor legislation, medical protection. More important, however, is the fact that much labor liberalism is vestigial, rote rather than radical. Labor’s social idealism has waned before the tendencies of bureaucracy, materialism, and business ethics. The moderate success of the last twenty years struggle has braked, instead of accelerating, labor’s zeal for reform. Even the House of Labor has bay windows. Not only is this true of the labor elite, but as well of the rank-and-file. The latter are indifferent unionists, willing to strike if the labor boss will take care of them while they are “out”, unwilling to attend meetings, confused by the bureaucratic complexity of labor-management negotiations, lulled to comfort by the accessibility of luxury and the opportunity for long-term contracts. The general absence of union democracy finalizes worker apathy.

Certain problems facing the economy and labor should be seen in a more detailed way. In their newness and urgency, two problems stand out: the revolution in automation, and the replacement of scarcity by the potential of material abundance.

Automation, the process of machines replacing men in performing sensory, motoric, and complicated logical tasks, is transforming society in ways that cannot be fully comprehended. By 1959, industrial production regained its 1957 pre-recession level—but with 750,000 fewer workers required. In the Fifties as a whole, national production enlarged by 43 percent, but the number of factory employees remained stationary—only seven-tenths of 1 percent higher than in 1947. The electronics industry lost 200,000 of 900,000 workers in the years 1953–57. In the steel industry, productive capacity has increased 20 percent since 1955, while the number of workers has fallen 17,000. Employment in the auto industry decreased in the same period from 746,000 to 614,000. The chemical industry has enlarged its productive powers 27 percent although its work force has dropped by three percent. A farmer in 1962 can grow enough to feed 24 people, where one generation ago only 12 could be nourished. The United States Bureau of the Census used 50 statisticians in 1960 to perform the service that required 4,100 in 1950. Automation is destroying whole categories of work—impersonal thinkers have efficiently labelled this “structural unemployment”—in blue-collar, service, and even middle management occupations. In addition, it is eliminating employment opportunities for a youth force that numbers one million more than it did in 1950, and rendering work far more difficult both to find and do for people in their forties and up. The consequence of this economic drama, strengthened by the force of three post-war recessions, are momentous: five million becomes an acceptable unemployment tabulation, and misery, uprootedness and anxiety become the lot of increasing numbers of Americans.

But while automation is creating social dislocation of a stunning kind, it paradoxically is imparting the opportunity for men the world around to rise in dignity from their knees. In the future, there will be fewer and fewer tasks beyond the scope of the machine—and fewer and fewer material impossibilities facing man, if they so choose. For the dominant optimistic economic fact of the epoch is that fewer hands are needed now in actual production although more goods and services are a real potentiality. Sadly, America has reacted to the coming of abundance in the same way it has to the effects of automation on unemployment: with tradition-oriented responses that indicate a lack of political imagination. Our reluctance to fully enter economic Utopia reflects a fear of leaving the “short, nasty, brutish”—but so familiar—world of Darwinian scarcity and capitalist competition. The very basis of traditional capitalism—profit incentives for private investors, a struggle for scarce resources, price and wage fighting, public progress through private planning—simply are not as relevant and efficient to the conditions of abundance as are cooperation, the rule of law, and democratic public planning. How is it “free enterprise” and how is it democratic when millions of public dollars are poured into scientific research so that the resulting space communications system can be turned over to A.T.&T.? Fearing the change of life by abundance and technology, threatened by enormous corporate lobbyists, America’s leadership has hesitated tragically—and calcified the national mind with rhetoric and political genuflections before the myths of the free market economy.

A reformed, more humane capitalism, functioning at three-fourths capacity while one-third of America and two-thirds of the world goes needy, domination of politics and the economy by fantastically rich elites, accommodation to the system by organized labor, hard-core poverty and unemployment, automation bringing the dark ascension of machine over man as well as the dawn of abundance, technological change being introduced into a huge economy on the criteria of profitability—this has been our inheritance. However inadequate, it has brought quiescence—a reflection of the extent to which misery has been overcome. Now, as a better state becomes visible, a new poverty impends: a poverty of vision, and a poverty of political action to make that vision reality.

The Military-Industrial Complex

Not only is ours the first generation to live with the possibility of world-wide cataclysm—-it is the first to experience the actual social preparation for cataclysm, the general militarisation of American society. In 1948, just when many of us were becoming anxious about our manliness, Congress required a social test of it by establishing Universal Military Training, the first peacetime conscription. The military bureaucracy was beginning. Four years earlier, General Electric’s Charles E. Wilson had heralded the creation of what he called the “permanent war economy”, the continuous military spending as a solution to the economic problems unsolved before the post-war Boom, most notably the problem of the seventeen million jobless after eight years of the New Deal.

Since our childhood, these two trends—rise of the military apparatus and installation of the defense economy—have grown fantastically. The Department of Defense, ironically the world’s largest single organization, is worth $160 billion, owns 32 million acres of American land, employs half the 7.5 million persons directly dependent on the Military for subsistence, has an $11 billion payroll which is larger than the net annual income of all American corporations. Defense spending in the Eisenhower era totaled $350 billions and President Kennedy entered office pledged to go even beyond the present defense allocation of sixty cents from every public dollar spent. Except for a war-induced boom immediately after we bombed Hiroshima, American economic prosperity has coincided with a growing dependence on military outlay—from 1941 to 1959 America’s Gross National Product of $525 trillion included $700 million in goods and services purchased for the defense effort, a fraction of about one-seventh of the accumulated GNP. This pattern has included the steady concentration of military spending among a few corporations. In 1961, 86 percent of Defense Department contracts were awarded without competition. The ordnance industry of 100,000 people is completely engaged in military work; in the aircraft industry, 94 percent of 750,000 are linked to the war economy; shipbuilding, radio and communications equipment industries commit forty percent of their work to defense; iron and steel, petroleum, metal-stamping and machine shop products, motors and generators, tools and hardware, copper, aluminum, and machine tools industries all devote at least 10 percent of their work to the same cause.

The intermingling of Big Military and Big Industry is evidenced in the l,400 former officers working for the 100 corporations who received nearly all the $21 billion spent in procurement by the Defense Department in 1961. The overlap is most poignantly clear in the case of General Dynamics, the company which received the best 1961 contracts, employed the most retired officers (187), and is directed by a former Secretary of the Army. A Fortune magazine profile of General Dynamics said: “The unique group of men who run Dynamics are only incidentally in rivalry with other U.S. manufacturers, with many of whom they actually act in concert. Their chief competitor is the USSR. The core of General Dynamics corporate philosophy is the conviction that national defense is a more or less permanent business.” Little has changed since Wilson’s proud declaration of the Permanent War Economy back in the 1944 days when the top 200 corporations possessed 80 percent of all active prime-war-supply contracts. Little, except the menace.

The military and its supporting business foundation have numerous forms of distinctly political expression, and we have heard their din endlessly. There has not been a major Congressional split on the issue of continued defense spending spirals in our lifetime. The triangular relation of the business, military and political arenas cannot be better expressed than in Dixiecrat Carl Vinson’s remarks as his House Armed Services Committee reported out a military construction bill of $808 million, distributed through 50 states, for 1960–61: “There is something in this bill for everyone”, he announced. President Kennedy had earlier acknowledged the valuable anti-recession features of the bill.

Imagine, on the other hand, $808 million suggested as an anti-recession measure, but being poured into programs of social welfare: The impossibility of receiving support for such a measure identifies a crucial feature of defense spending: it is beneficial to private enterprise, while welfare spending is not. Defense spending does not “compete” with the private sector; it contains a natural obsolescence; its “confidential” nature permits easier boondoggling; the tax burdens to which it leads can be shunted from corporation to consumer as a “cost of production”. Welfare spending, however, involves the government in competition with private corporations and contractors; it conflicts with the immediate interests of private pressure groups; it leads to taxes on business. Think of the opposition of private power companies to current proposals for river and valley development, or the hostility of the real estate lobby to urban renewal; or the attitude of the American Medical Association to a paltry medical care bill; or of all business lobbyists to foreign aid; these are the pressures leading to the schizophrenic public-military, private-civilian economy of our epoch. The politicians, of course, take the line of least resistance and thickest support: warfare, instead of welfare, is easiest to stand up for; after all, the Free World is at stake (and our constituency’s investments, too).

Business and politics, when significantly militarized, affect the whole living condition of each American citizen. Worker and family depend on the Cold War for life. Half of all research and development is concentrated on military ends. The press mimics conventional cold war opinion in its editorials. In less than a full generation, most Americans accept the military-industrial structure as “the way things are”.

War is still pictured as one more kind of diplomacy, perhaps a gloriously satisfying kind. Our saturation and atomic bombings of Germany and Japan are little more than memories of past “policy necessities” that preceded the wonderful economic Boom in 1946. The facts that our once-revolutionary 20,000 ton Hiroshima Bomb is now paled by 50 megaton weapons, that our lifetime has included the ballistic missiles, that “greater” weapons are to follow, that weapons refinement is more rapid than the development of weapons of defense, that soon a dozen or more nations will have the Bomb, that one simple miscalculation could incinerate mankind: these orienting facts are but remotely felt. A shell of moral callous separates the citizen from sensitivity of the common peril: this is the result of a lifetime saturation with horror. After all, some ask, where could we begin, even if we wanted to? After all, others declare, we can only assume things are in the best of hands. A coed at the University of Kentucky says, “we regard peace and war as fairy tales”. And a child has asked in helplessness, perhaps for us all, “Daddy, why is there a cold war?”

Past senselessness permits present brutality; present brutality is prelude to future deeds of still greater inhumanity; that is the moral history of the twentieth century, from the First World War to the present. A half-century of accelerating destruction has flattened out the individual’s ability to make moral distinctions, it has made people understandably give up, it has forced private worry and public silence.

To a decisive extent, the means of defense, the military technology itself, determines the political and social character of the state being defended—that is, defense mechanisms themselves in the nuclear age alter the character of the system that creates them for protection. So it has been with America, as her democratic institutions and habits have shrivelled in almost direct proportion to the growth of her armaments. Decisions about military strategy, including the monstrous decision to go to war, are more and more the property of the Military and the industrial arms race machine, with the politicians assuming a ratifying role, instead of a determining one. This is increasingly a fact not just because of the installation of the permanent military, but because of constant revolutions in military technology. The new technologies allegedly require military expertise, scientific comprehension, and the mantle of secrecy. As Congress relies more and more on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Department Pentagon, their hired science machine and lobbying troop, the existing chasm between people and decision-makers becomes irreconcilably wide, and more alienating in its effects.

A necessary part of the military effort is propaganda: to “sell” congressional appropriating committees, to conceal various business scandals, and to convince the American people that the arms race is important enough to sacrifice civil liberties and social welfare. So confusion prevails about the national needs, while the three major services and their industrial allies jockey for power—the Air Force tending to support bombers and missilery, the Navy Polaris and carriers, the Army conventional ground forces and invulnerable nuclear arsenals, and all three feigning unity by support of the policy of weapons agglomeration called “the mix”. Strategies are advocated on the basis of power and profit, usually more than on the basis of military needs. In the meantime, Congressional investigating committees—most notably the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee—attempt to curb the little dissent that finds its way into off-beat magazines. A huge militant anti-communist brigade throws in its support, patriotically willing to do anything to achieve “total victory” in the Cold War, the Government advocates peaceful confrontation with international communism, then utterly pillories and outlaws the tiny American Communist Party. University professors withdraw prudently from public issues; the very style of social science writing becomes more qualified, studies show. Needs in housing, education, minority rights, health care, land redevelopment, hourly wages, are all subordinated—though a political tear is shed gratuitously—to the primary objective of the “military and economic strength of the Free World”.

What are the governing policies which supposedly justify all this human sacrifice and waste? With few exceptions they have reflected the quandaries and confusion, stagnation and anxiety, of a stalemated nation in a turbulent world. They have shown a slowness, sometimes a sheer inability to react to a sequence of new problems.

Of these problems, two of the newest are foremost: the existence of poised nuclear weapons and the revolutions against the former colonial powers. In the both areas, the Soviet Union and various national communist movements have aggravated international relations in inhuman and undesirable ways, but hardly so much as to blame only communism for the present menacing situation.

Nuclear Policy

The accumulation of nuclear arsenals, the threat of accidental war, the possibility of limited war becoming illimitable holocaust, the impossibility of achieving real arms superiority or final invulnerability, the near nativity of a cluster of infant atomic powers—all of these events have tended to undermine traditional concepts of international relations. War can no longer be considered as an instrument of international politics, a way of strengthening alliances, adjusting the balance of power, maintaining national sovereignty, or defending any values. War guarantees none of these things today. Soviet or American “megatonnage” is sufficient to destroy all existing social structure as well as human values; missiles have thumbed (figuratively) their nosecones at national boundaries. America, however, still operates by means of national defense and deterrence systems. These are effective only so long as they are never fully used: unless we can convince Russia that we will commit the most vicious action in human history, we will have to do it.

“They are not meant to be used. They keep the peace because nobody is mad enough to wish the end of the world. In our jargon, if you will, no one dares to strike first because no one is prepared to accept retaliation”. Can international stability be pivoted around Doomsday weapons? How long? What will happen when China, Germany, Poland, France, Japan, Egypt, Israel and ten other countries get the Bomb? What about mechanical failures then? What about being able to distinguish accident from aggression then?

“We in the Air Force especially favor being prepared to win the war, though we do want to prevent its coming, if at all possible. The trick, as we see it, is to get invulnerable weapons of our own, then be prepared to strike at Russia’s military bases only”. Do you really think you can just hit atomic installations with your counterforce designs? What about the nearby cities? Do you think those Russians will respond in the rational way you expect, by attacking only our military centers? If they are so rational, why do you say they won’t negotiate with us? Do you really think the arms race can go on permanently?

“We favor an invulnerable deterrent, too, so that all wars of the future will be fought conventionally. We expect a series of struggles, a protracted conflict with the Reds. A long twilight struggle—that’s what the President calls it all”. If a country is losing a small war—and what does it mean to discuss small or conventional wars today?—will it decide against using atomic weapons and risking escalation to thermonuclear conflict? What will you do about accidents, or about the little countries with the big weapons? Why hasn’t any nation ever achieved satisfactory vulnerability, and why do you expect that we will be the first?

“I’d rather be dead than red personally, and I think that most likely we’ll avoid both if we sit tight until Russia opens up in a few years. But let’s be realistic. If war comes, it comes. It will be bad, maybe 100 million dead, but the nation will recover as it did after the last war”. Is such patriotism truly realistic? Doesn’t sitting tight abdicate all chance of intervening in the arms race? In what sense does a nation “recover” when 100 million of its people are dead? You only mentioned the dead people when you referred to recovery: what of the rest of the system, the communications, the disease among the living and unborn, the psychological chaos, the ruined path of social relations, the transportation system? If it will be possible to recover in that infernal moment, why is it not possible to recover now from the less awful predicaments gripping us?

Not since the years immediately after World War II, when the Soviet Union was without atomic weapons and the United Nations was overwhelmingly pro-Western, have we committed ourselves convincingly and unequivocably to the goal of a disarmed world. We have blamed our reluctance on the inadequacies of international rule-making institutions—institutions which could have been improved. We have blamed faulty inspection mechanisms—when the mechanisms were not faulty in the minds of others, or when they were easily refinable. Especially, we have blamed the Russians—while it has become steadily clearer that the Russians, their tyrannies and cynicisms granted, and their foreign policy zig-zagging as well, find disarmament to be more in their economic and political interests than the armaments race.

We do not contend that the Cold War predicaments are solely the fault of the West. We do not contend that disarmament would come tomorrow if only America would will it-the Russians do not trust us, and their are significant groupings in the Soviet Union who favor a “hot” arms race to the reconciling qualities of disarmament. We do contend, as Americans, that our government has blamed everything but its own hesitation, its own anachronistic dependence on weapons, its own fears of the uncertain world beyond the Cold War. What our government has not blamed is its own theory that the risks of the present are fewer than the risks of serious change.

Again, at a time demanding vision and flexibility, America hesitates in policy paralysis. But now even hesitation itself has changed—where once it boded safety of transition, today it perpetuates the drift towards conflict. We are edging toward a war which will not be fought between America and Russia, not externally between two national entities, but the first international civil war, within the unrespected and unestablished human civitas which spans the world.

The Colonial Revolution

While weapons have accelerated man’s opportunity for self-destruction, the counter-impulse to life and creation are superbly manifest in the revolutionary feelings of many Asian, African and Latin American peoples. Against the individual initiative and aspiration, and social sense of organicism characteristic of these upsurges, the American apathy and stalemate stand in embarrassing contrast.

It is difficult today to give human meaning to the welter of facts that surrounds us. That is why it is especially hard to understand the facts of “underdevelopment”: In India, man and beast together produced 65 percent of the nation’s economic energy, and of the remaining 35 percent of inanimately produced power almost three-fourths was obtained by burning dung. But in the United States, human and animal power together account for only one percent of the national economic energy—that is what stands humanly behind the vague term “industrialization”. Even to maintain the misery of Asia today at a constant level will require a rate of growth tripling the national income and the aggregate production by the end of the century. For Asians to have the (unacceptable) 1950 standard of Europeans, less than $2,000 per year for a family, national production must increase 21-fold by the end of the century, and that monstrous feat only to reach a level that Europeans find intolerable.

What has America done? During the years 1955–57 our total expenditures in economic aid were equal to one-tenth of one percent of our total Gross National Product. Prior to that time it was less; since then it has been a fraction higher. Immediate social and economic development is needed—we have helped little, seeming to prefer to create a growing gap between “have” and “have not” rather than to usher in social revolutions which would threaten our investors and our military alliances. The new nations want to avoid power entanglements that will open their countries to foreign domination—and we have often demanded loyalty oaths. They do not see the relevance of uncontrolled free enterprise in societies without accumulated capital and a significant middle class—and we have looked calumniously on those who would not try “our way”. They seek empathy—and we have sided with the old colonialists, who now are trying to take credit for “giving” all the freedom that has been wrested from them, or we “empathize” when pressure absolutely demands it.

With rare variation, American foreign policy in the Fifties was guided by a concern for foreign investment, a negative anti-communist political stance linked to a series of military alliances, both undergirded by military threat. We participated unilaterally—usually through the Central Intelligence Agency—in revolutions against governments in Laos, Guatemala, Cuba, Egypt, Iran. We permitted economic investment to decisively affect our foreign policy: fruit in Cuba, oil in the Middle East, diamonds and gold in South Africa (with whom we trade more than with any African nation). More exactly: America’s “foreign market” in the late Fifties, including exports of goods and services plus overseas sales by American firms, averaged about $60 billion annually. This represented twice the investment of 1950, and it is predicted that the same rates of increase will continue. The reason is obvious; Fortune said in 1958, “foreign earnings will more than double in ten years, more than twice the probable gain in domestic profits”. These investments are concentrated primarily in the Middle East and Latin America, neither region being an impressive candidate for the long-run stability, political caution, and lower-class tolerance that American investors typically demand.

Our pugnacious anti-communism and protection of interests has led us to an alliance not entirely appropriately called “the free world”. It includes four major parliamentary democracies: ourselves, Canada, Great Britain, and India. It also has included through the years Batista, Franco, Verwoerd, Salazar, De Gaulle, Boun Oum, Ngo Diem, Chiang-Kai-Shek, Trujillo, the Somozas, Saud, Ydigoras—all of these non-democrats separating us deeply from the colonial revolutions.

Since the Kennedy administration began, the American government seems to have initiated policy changes in the colonial and underdeveloped areas. It accepted “neutralism” as a tolerable principle; it sided more than once with the Angolans in the United Nations; it invited Souvanna Phouma to return to Laos after having overthrown his neutralist government there; it implemented the Alliance for Progress that Eisenhower had proposed when Latin America appeared on the verge of socialist revolutions; it made derogatory statements about the Trujillos; it cautiously suggested that a democratic socialist government in British Guiana might be necessary to support; in inaugural oratory, it suggested that a moral imperative was involved in sharing the world’s resources with those who have been previously dominated. These were hardly sufficient to heal the scars of past activity and present associations, but nevertheless they were motions away from the Fifties. But quite unexpectedly, the President ordered the Cuban invasion, and while the American press railed about how we had been “shamed” and defied by that “monster Castro”, the colonial peoples of the world wondered whether our foreign policy had really changed from its old imperialist ways (we had never supported Castro, even on the eve of his taking power, and had announced early that “the conduct of the Castro government toward foreign private enterprise in Cuba” would be a main state Department concern). Any heralded changes in our foreign policy are now further suspect in the wake of the Punta d’el Este foreign minister’s conference where the five countries representing most of Latin America refused to cooperate in our plans to further “isolate” the Castro government.

Ever since the colonial revolution began, American policy makers have reacted to new problems with old “gunboat” remedies, often thinly disguised. The feeble but desirable efforts of the Kennedy administration to be more flexible are coming perhaps too late, and are of too little significance to really change the historical thrust of our policies. The hunger problem is increasing rapidly mostly as a result of the worldwide population explosion that cancels out the meager triumphs gained so far over starvation. The threat of population to economic growth is simply documented: in 1960–70 population in Africa south of the Sahara will increase 14 percent; in South Asia and the Far East by 22 percent; in North Africa 26 percent; in the Middle East by 27 percent; in Latin America 29 percent. Population explosion, no matter how devastating, is neutral. But how long will it take to create a relation of trust between America and the newly-developing societies. How long to change our policies? And in what length of time?

The world is in transformation. But America is not. It can race to industrialize the world, tolerating occasional authoritarianisms, socialisms, neutralisms along the way—or it can slow the pace of the inevitable and default to the eager Soviets and, much more importantly, to mankind itself. Only mystics would guess we have opted for the first. Consider what our people think of this, the most urgent issue on the human agenda. Fed by a bellicose press, manipulated by economic and political opponents of change, drifting in their own history, they grumble about “the foreign aid waste”, or about “that beatnik down in Cuba”, or how “things will get us by”…thinking confidently, albeit in the usual bewilderment, that Americans can go right on like always, five percent of mankind producing forty percent of its goods.

Communism

Barely after we learned to read, we learned to hate communists: they supplanted Indians and bogey men (including Japs and Nazis) in our juvenile warring. As we grew up, we discovered that our childlike caricatures were not too unlike those of our parents and politicians. In national attitude we have abstracted Russians to demonic proportions, projecting upon them all blame for the Cold War. We righteously criticize “atheistic materialism” while we turn our own churches into centers of status for the opulent. The ease with which the arms race is “sold” to the public rests on the dominant paranoia toward the Soviet Union. Violations of free speech and association are justified because of the “threat to democracy”. President Kennedy, following the secretly-planned invasion of Cuba, was brash enough to ask that the press impose self-censorship so that this open society can compete with the closed society of Russia. In this atmosphere, even the most intelligent Americans have feared to join political organizations, sign petitions, speak out on serious issues—and social apathy has been deepened by prevailing fear of using the prerogative of free speech and free association. In this context, the major popular movements to arise (excepting the sit-in movement, where oppression was too great to endure in silence) have been those organized around the image of the Soviet Demon and propelled by the desperate need to “get things over with”.

Since Cold War America does not encourage an honest facing of the issues of communism, vast numbers of liberals and socialists have retreated in fear, giving at least tacit support to the conventional thinking. Many have avoided issues by simply taking public loyalty oaths—beginning any speech or article on public affairs with an anti-communist disclaimer (even in speeches against the attachment of loyalty oaths to National Defense Education Act grants many critics began with hand-washings).

This prefatory denunciation of communism, which infects nearly every liberal utterance, is justified as being effective—no mention is made of its intellectual quality, nor of its contribution to the mood of public hysteria, the hysteria that shuts off public analysis of world politics because almost nowhere in politics can we talk tentatively, inquiringly about “Russia”.

The people who should be our friends in the enterprise of understanding rival ideologies are often of little help. The radicals, socialists, and liberals of an earlier generation—those to whom we might turn for understanding—blur their analysis of “the Russian question” with a curious rhetoric and sectarian overtone. They have fought the battles with, or against, the Communists—in labor unions, civic and welfare groups, and political campaigns. The have struggled ideologically as members or fellows of the communist movement in the United States before making their personal break. They have perhaps made their peace with the order they once fought against and find occupation with the communists to be a mask for their own timidity in the face of a new generation of radicals not ready to make the same peace with society. They are trying to “get by” in a society that would be hostile in the extreme were they to ever let down their anti-communist shield. So while the older radicals are indispensable for information and advice, and while our sympathies parallel theirs on nearly every domestic issue, they tragically coalesce with the less-informed, conservative and even reactionary forces in performing a static analysis, in making Russia a “closed question”.

It is true undeniably that there exists a small cluster of people who, tired of Official America, project their wishful humanism onto the Soviet Union—without serious regard for critical evaluation. But the first two tendencies—the paranoic quest for decontamination and the replays of the old fights—are more menacing in many ways than the third, the uncritical hopefulness. The first two induce stultifying fear into the community and direct the energies of the left away from relevant contact with liberals and uncommitted personalities: they contribute directly to the public quietude and anxiety, and trigger the precise disenchantment with America that leads a tiny minority to uncritically support the Soviet Union.

It would seem reasonable to expect that in America the basic issues of the Cold War should be rationally and fully debated, between persons of all opinions—on television, on platforms, and through other media. It would seem, too, that there should be a way for a person or an organization to oppose communism withoutcontributing to the common fear of associations and public actions. But these things do not happen; instead, there is finger-pointing and comical debate about the most serious of issues. This trend of events on the domestic scene, towards increased irrationality on major questions, moves us to greater concern than does the problem of communism itself domestically.

Democracy, we are convinced, requires every effort to set in peaceful opposition the basic viewpoints of the day; only by conscious, determined, though difficult, efforts in this direction will the issue of communism be met appropriately.

Conventional discussion, to be sure, sometimes corresponds with realities: especially the attacks on the Soviet failure to establish democratic institutions, the irresponsibility of Soviet military policy, the phony Soviet equation of centralized, bureaucratic planning with the “triumph of true socialism”; and the numerous small and large denials of human dignity rationalized inadequately by appeals to history, posterity, or the “imperatives of revolution”.

But the occasional coincidence of conventional wisdom and the situation being described is not sufficient for the creation of sensible national attitudes and policies towards the various communisms and authoritarianisms in the world. In no instance is this better illustrated than in our national and policy-making assumption that the Soviet Union is inherently expansionist and aggressive and implements its desires by military means. Upon this assumption rests the monstrous American structure of “military preparedness”; because of it we insist that Russians cannot be trusted; because of it, too, we have sacrificed values and social programs to the alleged needs of military might. But the assumption, however, is not true—or at least it is false enough to challenge severely the basis of our foreign policy.

Because of an unfortunate national secrecy and related communications problems, it is not easy to assess the strategy and purpose of the Soviet Union. But available information does not justify the claim of Soviet military aggressiveness; rather it suggests that Russia is confronted with the dilemma of representing a revolution while becoming a conservative status quo nation state, that the Soviet Union places the avoidance of thermonuclear war ahead of its sincere desire to eliminate capitalism, that the Soviet Union wants to conduct its competition with capitalism not with rockets but with comparative abilities to fulfill the world’s needs. The forceful take-over of East Europe signalled not the first stage of European conquest but a clumsy and brutal establishment of a security zone by a harassed and weakened nation. Stalin did not seem to support the Chinese Revolution. The exercise of force in Iran, Korea, and Berlin has been controlled always by a desire to avoid escalating war. The savage repression of the Hungarian Revolution was a defensive action rooted in Soviet fear that its empire would collapse.

Despite this evidence, some will claim that “defensive” is too broadly defined, that it includes virtual aggression by a different name. This is not an insensible criticism, but it still fails to establish the veracity of the counter-claim, that Russia is out to gobble up the world. If there is even ambiguity about the Russian intention—and, to any but the completely blind, there is ambiguity—then our foreign and domestic policies rest on shaky foundation. In the same way would Russian policy be unsound if it it assumed that American inspired coups in Iran, Cuba, Guatemala, and Laos were the products of a necessarily militaristic and expansionist system. (By these actions and others, incidentally, America has given the Soviets understandable reason to believe such an estimate, just as Soviet actions have given fodder to the “tough” faction in American strategy-studying circles.)

Thus there is considerable reason to believe that the Soviets are not as interested in the forceful conquest of the world as the NATO and American military-industrial complex seem to want Americans to wish. It appears that many of those calling students “communist dupes” are “dupes” themselves of an intensive propaganda effort against intellectual independence and serious, dispassionate reflection on international problems. What does this mean in terms of the most pressing current issue, that involving war and peace? It means that the Soviet Union, despite various vacillations, is today more interested in disarmament than our policy-makers indicate. First of all, the Soviet Union says it wants disarmament, a statement the United States has been unwilling to make until 1961. For the Soviet Union, disarmament makes political and economic sense. Their people are restless for an end to the intolerable austerities of the Stalin era. The Russian economy is not large enough to spend on warfare and welfare (Russia’s smaller budget allocates 15% to defense spending, while the far larger American one allocates 10%): thus disarmament of some kind is the only means by which Russia can better satisfy the material needs of its population. Further, the Soviet Union perceives the world-wide colonial revolution as leading to the end of capitalism, and wants to give more economic aid to those revolutions without the menace of thermonuclear war impending. Further, the Russian-Chinese debate suggests that the Chinese, not the Russians, support colonial revolutions even at the immediate risk of world war.

It is very hard, without the use of force, to encourage the development of skepticism, anti-war, or pro-democratic attitudes in the Soviet and communist systems. America has done a great deal to foment the easier, opposite tendency: suspicion, Stalinism, and a “hard” nuclear policy. We have created a system of military alliances which are of even dubious deterrence value. It is quite reasonable to suggest that “Berlin” and “Laos” have become earth-shaking situations precisely because rival systems of deterrence make impossible the withdrawal of threat. The “status quo” is not cemented by mutual threat but by mutual fear of receding from pugnacity—since the latter course would undermine the “credibility” of our deterring systems.

Simultaneously, while billions in military aid was propping up right-wing Laotian, Formosan, Iranian, and other regimes, American leadership never developed a purely political policy for offering concrete alternatives to the colonial revolutions.

The results have been: fulfillment of the Communist belief that capitalism is stagnant and only capable of defense by dangerous military adventurism; destabilizing incidents in numerous developing nations; an image of America allied with corrupt and undemocratic oligarchies counterposed to the Russian-Chinese image of rapid, though brutal, economic development in less than half a century. Again and again, America mistakes the static area of defense, rather than the dynamic area of development, as the master need of two-thirds of mankind. In a sense, the charge of military aggressiveness might just as easily be hung on America as on the Soviet regime. For throughout modern history, with the shaky exception of World War II, Americans have attempted crudely to exterminate the Soviets—from the invasion of Russia by the United States and other Western nations at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution down to the present day. At the root of our policies has been the attitude that Communism, being evil, could be exterminated by action of the Good: nowhere is this better illustrated than in the popular theory that Communist China be kept from the family of nations while Chiang Kai Shek prepares for his quixotic return. This is representative of the domestic attitude that, while no one is sure of the long-range outcome, we will “muddle through” because we are the United States of America. The stymie at home, the multiple threats abroad: these will be overcome “somehow.” President Kennedy’s description of the Cold War as a “long twilight struggle” is seen as an apt and profound image, not as a sign of a policy without teleology, without a sound estimate of what will be happening in the world during the rest of the 20th Century, without a set of ultimate values defined in terms relevant to the immediate and approaching human experience.

The celebrated American innocence remains.

The Discrimination Problem

Our America still is white.

Consider the plight, statistically, of its greatest nonconformists, the “nonwhites” (a Census Bureau word).

1. Literacy One of every four “nonwhites” is functionally illiterate; half do not complete elementary school; one in five finishes high school or better. But one in twenty whites is functionally illiterate; four of five finish elementary school; half go through high school or better.

2. Salary In 1959 a “nonwhite” worker would expect to average $2,844 annually; a “nonwhite” family, including a college-educated father, could expect to make $5,654 collectively. But a white worker could expect $4,487 if he worked alone; with a college degree and a family of helpers he could expect $7,373 (the approximate 1:2 pay ratio has remained substantially the same, with the exception of the World war II Boom, for generations).

3. Work More than half of all “nonwhites” work at laboring or service jobs, including one-fourth of those with college degrees; one in 20 works in professional or managerial capacity. Fewer that one in five of all whites are laboring or service workers, including one in every 100 of the college-educated; one in four is in professional or managerial work.

4. Unemployment Within the 1960 labor force (about 72 million, including five million unemployed), one of every 10 “nonwhites” was unemployed. Only one of every 20 whites suffered that condition.

5. Housing The census classifies 57 percent of all “nonwhite” houses substandard. Of white houses, 27 percent are substandard.

Even against this background, some will say progress is being made. The facts belie it, however, unless it is assumed that America has another 100 years to solve her “race problem”. Others, more pompous, will blame the situation on “those people’s inability to pick themselves up”, not understanding the automatic way in which the American system is racist. The one-party system in the South, attached to the Dixiecrat-Republican complex nationally, cuts off the Negro’s hope for real political expression and representation. The fact of economic dependence on the white, with little labor union protection, cuts off the Negro’s independent powers as a citizen. Discrimination in employment, along with labor’s accommodation to “lily-white” hiring practices, guarantees the lowest slot in the economy to the “nonwhite”. North or South, those oppressed are conditioned by their inheritance and their surroundings to expect more of the same: in housing, schools, recreation, travel all their potential is circumscribed, thwarted, and often extinguished. Automation grinds up job opportunities, and ineffective or nonexistent retraining programs makes the already-handicapped “nonwhite” even less equipped to participate in “technological progress”.

Horatio Alger Americans typically believe that the “nonwhites” are gradually being “accepted” and “rising”. They see more Negroes on television and so assume that Negroes are “better off”. They hear the President talking about Negroes and so assume they are politically represented. They are aware of black peoples in the United Nations and so assume that men are much more tolerant these days. They don’t drive through the South, or through the slum areas of there, so they assume that squalor is disappearing. They express generalities about “time and gradualism” to hide the fact that they don’t know what is happening.

The advancement of the Negro and the other “nonwhites” in America has not been altogether by means of the crusades of liberalism, but rather through unavoidable changes in social structure. The economic pressures of World War II opened new jobs, new mobility, new insights to Southern Negroes, who then began great migrations from the South to the bigger urban areas of the North where their absolute wage was greater, though unchanged in relation to the white man in the same stratum. More important than the World War II openings was the colonial revolution. The worldwide upsurge of dark peoples against white colonial exploitation stirred the aspiration and created urgency among the Negroes of America. At the same time it threatened the power structure of the United States enough to concede gains to the Negro, thus spurring his spirit. Produced by outer pressure from the newly-moving peoples rather than by the internal conscience of American government, the gains were keyed to improving “the American image” more than to reconstructing a society that prospered on top of its minorities. Thus came the historic Supreme Court decision of 1954, desegregating (theoretically) Southern schools. That the decision was more a proclamation than a harbinger of social change is reflected in the fact that only a fraction of Southern school districts have desegregated—and federal officials have done very little to hasten the process.

It has been said that the Kennedy Administration did more in two years than the Eisenhower Administration did in eight. Of this there can be no doubt—but it is analogous to comparing a whisper to silence when humanity demands forcefulness in statement and deed. Kennedy leapt ahead of the Eisenhower record when he made his second reference to the race problem; Eisenhower did not utter a meaningful public statement until his last month in office when he mentioned the “blemish” of bigotry.

To avoid conflict with the Dixiecrat-Republican alliance, Kennedy has developed a civil rights philosophy of “enforcement, not enactment”, implying that existing statutory tools are sufficient to change the lot of the Negro. So far he has employed executive power usefully to appoint Negroes to various offices, and seems actively interested in seeing the Southern Negro registered to vote (although he appointed a racist judge in Mississippi and seems disinclined to support voter registration unless pressured). While campaigning, the President criticized the Eisenhower administration for not signing a federal order forbidding the use of public funds in building houses—but since his election, the promised housing order has several times been delayed so as to avoid conflicts. Only two civil rights bills, one to abolish the poll tax in five states and another to prevent unfair use of literacy tests in registration, have been proposed—Kennedy giving active public support to neither (the more important, that involving literacy tests, was crushed in the Senate). The Administration is decidedly “cool” (a phrase of Robert Kennedy’s) toward any mass nonviolent movement in the South, though by the support of racist Dixiecrats the Administration makes impossible gradual action through conventional channels. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the South is composed of Southerners: their intervention in situations of “racial tension” is always after the incident, not before. Kennedy has refused to “enforce” the legal prerogative to keep federal marshals active in Southern areas before, during and after any “situations” (this would invite Negroes to exercise their rights and it would infuriate the Southerners in Congress because of its “insulting” features).

While corrupt politicians, together with business interests happy with the absence of organized labor in Southern states and with the $50 billion in profits that results from paying the Negro half a “White wage”, stymie or slow fundamental progress, what occurs among the people at large? While hungry “nonwhites” the world around assume rightful dominance, the American fights to keep integrated housing out of the suburbs. While a fully interracial world becomes a biological probability, the American persists in opposing marriage between the races. While whole cultures gradually interpenetrate, white America is ignorant still of nonwhite America—and openly, if necessary, glad of it. The white lives almost completely within his immediate, close-up world where things are tolerable, there are no Negroes except on the bus corners going to and from work, and where it is important the daughter marry “right”. White, like might, makes right.

Not knowing the “nonwhite”, however, the white knows something less than himself. Not comfortable around “different people”, he reclines in whiteness instead of preparing for diversity. Refusing to yield objective social freedom to the “nonwhite”, the white loses his personal, subjective freedom by turning away from “all these damn causes”.

But the right to refuse service to anyone is no longer reserved to the Americans. The minority groups, internationally, are changing place.

At the End of an Era

When we were kids the United States was the strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred, the only major country untouched by modern war, the wealthiest and boomingest country, and one entering a United Nations which would distribute American and British influence throughout the world. As we grew and perceived more, our country’s virtue was denuded: the ugliness began to show, sometimes glaringly, sometimes imperceptibly. Most concretely, it was there in the alliance with the old colonialists as the new revolutionaries were emerging in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The denuding, however, was the result of our hard efforts to see, not of America’s desire to show herself. The ugliness was observed; America did not introspect, although it became fashionable to examine national purposes. Almost as if the truths about America were too much to bear, many turned to concentration on image, on posture, on outer relations rather than on inner realities.

We have tried to describe what our observations led us to conclude. America is locked in a world crisis. The dimensions of crisis are huge and new: the menace of thermonuclear war, over-population, international anarchy, the demise of ancien regime before new radicalism, supertechnology altering the relation of man to man, man to work, man to community. Instead of trying to understand and abate the crisis, American economic and military elites, with the ratification of the politicians and the indirect reinforcement of the communications, advertising and educational systems, have contributed to its aggravation.

Domestically, the militarizating of society, the stalemated and unrepresentative Congress, the domination of major corporations, the mimicry of convention by churches, schools and the mass media, all induce a severe sense of apathy into the national life, a glaze above anxieties. The apathy is not contentment amidst prosperity, as opinion-formers would have us believe. A capitalist prosperity creates anxiety, the anxiety which can find no outlet save in “more of the same”, and it is this sense of “more of the same”, the closed room, the giant rat race effect of modern society, that brings on real apathy, real, developed indifference to human affairs. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions in society are complex enough to wither most potential critics, so there are few charismatic proponents of change. The same institutions are so monstrous that they swiftly dissipate or repel the energies of protest and reform, limiting human expectancies.

Then, too, we are a materially stronger society, a fact that in its implication of success carries with it the implication of stagnation. By our own expansion we seem to have diminished the case for still more change.

Beneath the expressed notion that America will “get by somehow”, beneath the helplessness of those who are convinced that the world will soon blow up, beneath the stagnation of those who close their minds to the future, is the rarely articulated feeling that there are no alternatives to the present. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are very fearful of the thought that at any moment things will thrust out of control. They are fearful of change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect. For some, the only crusade that is not suspect is that of the reactionaries, going backwards to consolidate Old America from the modern fates that seem to beset her. Curiously, contemporary anxiety produces not only suspicion, but its opposite as well, the yearning to believe there is an alternative, that something can be done to improve circumstances. The push and pull between suspicion of change and desire for change, between dogmatics and radicalism, is the restless force, and perhaps the dynamic force, in Americans today.

It is the faith that alternatives exist, and can be discovered, that must move men. The grasp of human values, of the nature of man, of the makeup of modern society, is the urgent task before reformers. What do we ourselves believe, what should we urge others to believe, and how shall we organize to make our values operate in human affairs?

The Case for Values

Making values explicit—that is, creating and defending a vision of what ought to be—is a task that has been devalued and undervalued. The conventional moral terms of the age, the politician moralities—”free world”, “people’s democracies”—reflect realities poorly, if at all, and seem to function more as ruling myths than as descriptive principles. But neither has our experience in the universities gained us moral enlightenment—the old promise that knowledge and increased rationality would liberate society seems hollow. Our professors and administrators sacrifice controversy to public relations; their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world; their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms race; passion is ruled unscholastic. The questions we might want raised—what is really important? Can we live in a better way than this way? What should he regard as beautiful?—are not questions of a “fruitful, empirical nature”, and thus are brushed aside.

Unlike youth in other countries we are accustomed to moral leadership being exercised and moral dimensions being clarified by our elders. But today the preachments of the past seem inadequate to the forms of the present. Consider the old liberal and socialist slogans: Capitalism Cannot Reform Itself, United Against Fascism, General Strike, All Out on May Day. Or, more recently, No Cooperation with Commies and Fellow Travellers, Ideologies Are Exhausted, Bipartisanship, No Utopias. These are incomplete, and there are few new prophets.

It has been said that our liberal and socialist predecessors were plagued by vision without program, while our generation is plagued by program without vision. There is today astute grasp of method, technique—the committee, the ad hoc group, the lobbyist, the hard and soft sells, the make, the image projected—but, if pressed critically, such expertise is incompetent to explain its unstated ideals. It is highly fashionable to identify oneself by old categories, or by naming a respected political figure, or by explaining “how we would vote” on various issues.

Theoretic chaos has replaced idealistic thinking—and, unable to reestablish theoretic order, men have condemned idealism itself. The retreat from ideals and utopias is in face one of the defining features of social life in America. The reasons are various: the older dreams of the left were perverted by Stalinism and never recreated; the congressional stalemate makes men limit their definitions of “the possible”; the specialization of activity leaves no place for sweeping thought; the very horrors of the twentieth century, notably the gas ovens and concentration camps and atom bombs, have blasted hopefulness and ushered in the mood of despair. To be hopeful is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded. To have no aspiration, on the contrary, is to be considered “tough-minded.”

In suggesting social goals and theories, therefore, we are aware of entering a realm of disrepute. Perhaps matured by the past, we have no sure formulas, no closed theories—but that does not mean values are beyond discussion and tentative determination. We are convinced that a first task of any new social movement is to convince people that the search for orienting theories and the creation of human values are both possible and worthwhile. We propose that the world is not too complex, our knowledge not too limited, our time not so short, as to prevent the systematic building of a structure of theory, one for man and about man. The inner thoughts of men and appreciative communicating between men can be regenerated. Men can integrate their confused sentiments and discrete notions, becoming creators and self-makers, rather than pitiful, buffeted things unable to understand the forces that control.

Values

Our social goals involve conceptions of man, human relationships, and social systems.

We regard Man as infinitely precious and infinitely perfectible. In affirming these principles we are countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs. We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things, and we regard it as a preface to irresponsibility; if anything, the brutalities of the twentieth century teach that means and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to “posterity” cannot justify the mutilation of the present. We oppose, too, the notion of human incompetence because it rests essentially on the modern fact that men have been manipulated into incompetence; we see little reason why men cannot meet with increasing skill the complexities and responsibilities of their situation, society is organized not for minority, but for majority, participation in decision-making.

Men have infinite potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic; a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved; one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, and ability and willingness to learn.

This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism—the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that is one’s own. Nor do we deify man—we merely have faith in his potential.

Human relationships should involve fraternity and honesty. Human interdependence is contemporary fact; human brotherhood must be willed however, as a condition of future survival and as the most appropriate form of social relations. Personal links between man and man are needed, especially to go beyond the partial and fragmentary bonds of function that bind men only as worker to worker, employer to employee, teacher to student, American to Russian.

Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man by man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.

As the individualism we affirm is not egoism, the selflessness we affirm is not self-elimination. On the contrary, we believe in sacrifice of a kind that imprints one’s unique individual qualities in the relation to other men, and to all human activity. Further, to dislike isolation is not to favor the abolition of privacy; the latter differs from isolation in that it occurs or is abolished according to individual will. Finally, we would replace power and personal uniqueness rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.

As a social system we seek the establishment of a participatory democracy, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.

In a participative community, social decision-making is carried on not through private groupings but through public ones. The political experience is not viewed as separate and “lower” than other private experiences, nor are the instruments of politics mere tools by which man defends himself from his fellows. Rather, the political life involves men commonly engaged in the art of creating an acceptable pattern of social relations and arrangements. Political life should be a necessary, though not sufficient, part of the total experience by which men find meaning in their personal and collective life and by which they establish a society to meet their collectively-determined needs. Politics, therefore, is the effort to clarify and solve problems facing the community. Institutionally, it should provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration, opposing views should be organized so as to illuminate choices and facilitate the attainment of goals, channels should be commonly available to relate men to knowledge and to power so that private problems—from bad recreative facilities to personal alienation—are formulated and considered as general issues.

Violence is an abhorrent form of social interchange. We seek, through participative community, to prevent elite control of the means of violence, but more importantly, to develop the institutions—local, national, international—that encourage and guarantee nonviolence as a condition of conflict.

As political life does not make power the incentive to political action in a participatory democracy, the economic life should involve incentives worthier than money or survival, such as creative satisfaction and personal growth from work.

With the political experience, the economic one is of such relevance that the individual must share in its determination. His work, both present and future, should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated. Around this experience men invariably will come to form their habits, their perceptions, their social ethics. It is imperative that work encourage independence, respect for others, a sense of dignity and a willingness to accept social responsibilities. Again, as with politics, the economy is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation. Private enterprise is not inherently immoral or undemocratic—indeed, it may at times contribute to offset elitist tendencies—but where it decisively affects the society’s functioning it should be democratically responsible to the needs and aspirations of society, not to the private interests of profit and productivity.

As with the political and economic spheres, all parts of a participatory democracy should have as a goal the fullest development of independence and social responsibility in the individual. A) The educational system should impart a sense of common human culture through the liberal arts and technical studies, as well as one or more specialized skills for each student. The measure of university greatness should not lie in the quantity of buildings, athletes, fraternities and sororities, but in the quality of independence and control which characterizes the teachers and students who actually participate in the educational process. The goal is neither specialized robots nor dispassionate eclecticism, but human beings with values and skills sufficient to live fully in the world. B) Prisons, mental health institutions, and hospitals should be directed to rehabilitation and restoration rather than to punishment or aggravation of human problems. C) Minimum needs in food and housing, or in case of debilitating accident, should be met by society for each of its members. D) Systems of transportation and communications should be shaped according to human need, not according to efficiency or profitability alone. E) The creative arts should be given high importance in human experience, and should be promoted by the whole society.

In all areas the society’s goal should be to guarantee equality of opportunity, and the basic freedoms to think and communicate. To make these freedoms and opportunities for participation appealing, societies should seek eventual decentralization as a principle in political and economic life.

What Is Needed?

How to end the Cold War? How to increase democracy in America? These are the decisive issues confronting liberal and socialist forces today. To us, the issues are intimately related, the struggle for one invariably being a struggle for the other. What policy and structural alterations are needed to obtain these ends?

1. Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence and arms control as the national defense goal.The strategy of mutual threat can only temporarily prevent thermonuclear war, and it cannot but erode democratic institutions here while consolidating oppressive institutions in the Soviet Union. Yet American leadership, while giving rhetorical due to the ideal of disarmament, persists in accepting mixed deterrence as its policy formula: under Kennedy we have seen first-strike and second-strike weapons, counter-military and counter-population intentions, tactical atomic weapons and guerilla warriors, etc. The convenient rationalization that our weaponspotpourri will confuse the enemy into fear of misbehaving is absurd and threatening. Our own intentions, once clearly retaliatory, are now ambiguous since the President has indicated we might in certain circumstances be the first to use nuclear weapons. We can expect that Russia will become more anxious herself, and perhaps even prepare to “preempt” us, and we (expecting the worst from the Russians) will nervously consider “pre-emption” ourselves. The symmetry of threat and counter-threat leads not to stability but to the edge of hell.

It is necessary that America make disarmament, not nuclear deterrence, “credible” to the Soviets and to the world. That is, disarmament should be continually avowed as a national goal; concrete plans should be presented at conference tables; real machinery for a disarming and disarmed world—national and international—should be created while the disarming process itself goes on. The long-standing idea of unilateral initiative should be implemented as a basic feature of American disarmament strategy: initiatives that are graduated in their risk potential, accompanied by invitations to reciprocation, done regardless of reciprocation, openly planned for a significant period of future time. Their function should not be to strip America of weapons, but to induce a climate in which disarmament can be discussed with less mutual hostility and threat. They might include: a unilateral nuclear test moratorium, withdrawal of several bases near the Soviet Union, proposals to experiment in disarmament by stabilization of zone of controversy; cessation of all apparent first-strike preparations, such as the development of 41 Polaris by 1963 while Naval theorists state that “about 45” constitutes a provocative force; inviting a special United Nations agency to observe and inspect the launchings of all American flights into outer space; and numerous others.

There is no simple formula for the content of an actual disarmament treaty. It should be phased: perhaps on a region-by-region basis, the conventional weapons first. It should be conclusive, not open-ended, in its projection. It should be controlled: national inspection systems are adequate at first, but should be soon replaced by international devices and teams. It should be more than denuding: world or at least regional enforcement agencies, an international civil service and inspection service, and other supranational groups must come into reality under the United Nations.

2. Disarmament should be seen as a political issue, not a technical problem.Should this year’s Geneva negotiations have resulted (by magic) in a disarmament agreement, the United States Senate would have refused to ratify it, a domestic depression would have begun instantly, and every fiber of American life would be wrenched drastically: these are indications not only of our unpreparedness for disarmament, but also that disarmament is not “just another policy shift”. Disarmament means a deliberate shift in most of our domestic and foreign policy.
   • It will involve major changes in economic direction. Government intervention in new areas, government regulation of certain industrial price and investment practices to prevent inflation, full use of national productive capacities, and employment for every person in a dramatically expanding economy—all are to be expected as the “price” of peace.
   • It will involve the simultaneous creation of international rule-making and enforcement machinery beginning under the United Nations, and the gradual transfer of sovereignties—such as national armies and national determination of “international” law—to such machinery.
   • It will involve the initiation of an explicitly political—as opposed to military—foreign policy on the part of the two major superstates. Neither has formulated the political terms in which they would conduct their behavior in a disarming or disarmed world. Neither dares to disarm until such an understanding is reached.

3. A crucial feature of this political understanding must be the acceptance of status quo possessions.This will be primarily an American task and an unpleasant one. All present national entities—including North Viet Nam, North Korea, East Germany and Communist China—should be brought into the United Nations as sovereign, no matter how undesirable, states. Russia cannot be expected to negotiate disarmament treaties for the Chinese. We should not feed Chinese fanaticism with our reactionary encirclement but Chinese bellies with the aim of making war contrary to Chinese policy interests. Everyday that we support anti-communist tyrants but refuse to even allow the Chinese communists representation in the UN marks a greater separation of our ideals and our actions, and it makes more likely bitter future relations with the Chinese.

Second, we should recognize that a military, expansionist West Germany insisting on re-unification only generates German nationalism and frightens the Soviets who have understandable reason to suspect Germanic intentions. President Kennedy himself told the editor of Izvestia that he fears an independent Germany with nuclear weapons, but American policies have not demonstrated cognizance of the fact that Chancellor Adenauer seeks continued East-West tension over the Berlin problem precisely because a relaxation would threaten German aspirations to become an independent nuclear power. As recently as 1958 it appeared that the long stalemate over Berlin was being solved. The West had not met Khruschev’s demand for recognition of East Germany and the end to West German re-armament, but the four Western ministers had agreed to reduce the number of soldiers in Berlin, to store no nuclear weapons there, and to stop using the city as a propaganda and spy center inside the Soviet world. The “spirit of Camp David” evolved—but then Western policy inexplicably changed to a no-concession attitude. This was followed by a militant speech by Khruschev, then by the U-2 flight, Western Denials, Khruschev’s exposure of pilot Powers, then Western affirmation of the flight and, finally, the collapse of the Summit that might have come to conclusions about Berlin.

A world war over Berlin would be absurd. Anyone concurring with such a proposition should demand that the West cease its contradictory advocacy of “reunification of Germany through free elections” and “a rearmed Germany in NATO”. It is madness to assume Russia will hand over East Germany so that a rearmed, reunited German state will enter the Western camp. Further, we ourselves should not welcome the existence of a West German deterrent, either independent or NATO-linked, only one generation after the defeat of the Nazis.

As for Berlin itself, Russia cannot expect the United States to tolerate its capture by the decadent Ulbricht regime, but neither can America expect to use Berlin-within-East Germany as a fortress within the communist world indefinitely. The Berlin problem cannot be solved without a radical change in Berlin itself, either through internationalization or literal transplantation or other similar means.

Third, national self-determination should be advocated by both power blocs as the only sensible principle of government and national development at the present time. Though defied by American support of unpopular dictators and by Russian totalitarianism, even lip-service advocacy of self-determination would make revolution-from-without less a threat in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and might establish precedents toward international order.

Finally, the United Nations must be accepted as the best arbiter of disputes and agency of orderly world development. This perhaps will be more distasteful to the Russians than to the Americans-as it means the rejection of the “troika” principle of government, which considerably obstructs the conduct of nations. Both the Russians and the Americans, presumably, will find the attenuation sovereignty palatable only if it increases their security—therefore the need for acceptable international institutions to grow while armaments recede. The United States should always attempt to channel negotiation through the UN. It should take the lead in respecting the Charter provision that all defense and regional agencies shall report to the Security Council regularly on their activities, thus establishing the principle if not the practice of UN authority. The United States should lead in creating international rules; the American withdrawal in 1953 from the UN effort to draft a Covenant on Human Rights should be reversed here and now. The United States should advocate the admission of all states to the UN, recognizing (as it does not recognize now) that the more oppressive the state the more important that it be engaged into the UN apparatus. The Security Council, with the addition of India and China, could become a permanent summit of foreign ministers—if the United States desires. The past must be forsaken increasingly: “entangling alliances” today are a condition of world peace.

4. Experiments in disengagement and demilitarization must be conducted as part of the total disarming process.These “disarmament experiments” can be of several kinds, so long as they are consistent with the principles of containing the arms race and isolating specific sectors of the world from the Cold War power play.

First, it is imperative that no more nations be supplied with or locally produce atomic weapons. A 1959 report of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences predicted that 19 nations would be so armed in the near future. Should this prediction be fulfilled, the prospects of war would be unimaginably expanded. For this reason the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union should bind against France (which wants its own independent deterrent) and seek, through United Nations or other machinery, the effective prevention of the spread of atomic weapons. This would involve not only declarations of “denuclearization” in whole areas of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe, but would attempt to create inspection machinery to guarantee the peaceful use of atomic energy.

Second, the United States should reconsider its increasingly outmoded European defense framework, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Since its creation in 1949, NATO has assumed increased strength in overall determination of Western military policy, but has become less and less relevant to its original purpose, which was the defense of central Europe. To be sure, after the Czech coup of 1948 it might have appeared that the Soviet Union was on the verge of a full-scale assault on Europe. But that onslaught has not materialized, not so much because of NATO’s existence but because of the general unimportance of much of central Europe to the Soviets. Today, when even American-based ICBMs could smash Russia minutes after an invasion of Europe, when the Soviets have no reason to embark on such an invasion, and when “thaw sectors” are desperately needed to brake the arms race, one of the least threatening but most promising courses for America would be toward the gradual diminishment of the NATO force, coupled with the negotiated “disengagement” of parts of central Europe. It is especially crucial that this be done while America is entering into favorable trade relations with the European Economic Community: such a gesture, combining economic ambition with less dependence on the military, would demonstrate the kind of competitive “coexistence” America intends to conduct with the communist-bloc nations. If the disengaged states were the two Germanies, Poland and Czechoslovakia, several other benefits would accrue. First, the United States would be breaking with the lip-service commitment to “liberation” of Eastern Europe which has contributed so much to Russian fears and intransigence, while doing too little about actual liberation. But the end of “liberation” as a proposed policy would not signal the end of American concern for the oppressed in East Europe. On the contrary, disengagement would be a real, rather than a rhetorical, effort to ease military tensions, thus undermining the Russian argument for tighter controls in East Europe based on the “menace of capitalist encirclement”. This policy, geared to the needs of democratic elements in the satellites, would develop a real bridge between East and West across the two most pro-Western Russian satellites. The Russians in the past have indicated some interest in such a plan, including the demilitarization of the Warsaw Pact countries. Their interest should be publicly tested. If disengagement could be achieved, a major zone could be removed from the Cold War, the German problem would be materially diminished, and the need for NATO would diminish, and attitudes favorable to disarming would be generated.

Needless to say, these proposals are much different than what is currently being practiced and praised. American military strategists are slowly acceding to the NATO demand for an independent deterrent, based on the fear that America might not defend Europe from military attack. These tendencies strike just the opposite chords in Russia than those which would be struck by disengagement themes: the chords of military alertness, based on the fear that NATO (bulwarked by the German Wermacht) is preparing to attack Eastern Europe of the Soviet Union. Thus the alarm which underlies the NATO proposal for an independent deterrent is likely itself to bring into existence the very Russian posture that was the original cause of fear. Armaments spiral and belligerence will carry the day, not disengagement and negotiation.

The Industrialization of the World

Many Americans are prone to think of industrialization of the newly-developing nations as a modern form of American noblesse, undertaken sacrificially for the benefit of others. On the contrary, the task of world industrialization, of eliminating the disparity between have and have-not nation, is as important as any issue facing America. The colonial revolution signals the end of an era for the old Western powers, and a time of new beginnings for most of the people of the earth. In the course of these upheavals, many problems will emerge: American policies must be revised or accelerated in several ways.

1. The United States’ principal goal should be creating a world where hunger, poverty, disease, ignorance, violence and exploitation are replaced as central features by abundance, reason, love, and international cooperation.To many this will seem the product of juvenile hallucination: but we insist it is a more realistic goal than is a world of nuclear stalemate. Some will say this is hopeful beyond all bounds: but to us it is far better to have positive vision than a “hard headed” resignation. Some will sympathize, but claim it is impossible; if so, then we, not Fate, are the responsible ones, for we have the means at our disposal. We should not give up the attempt for fear of the failure.

2. We should undertake here and now a fifty-year effort to prepare for all nations the conditions of industrialization.Even with far more capital and skill than we now import to emerging areas, serious prophets expect that two generations will pass before accelerating industrialism is a worldwide fact. The needs are numerous: every nation must build an adequate infrastructure (transportation, communication, land resources, waterways) for future industrial growth; agriculture must be modernized, expanded in productiveness, and diversified; there must be industries suited to the rapid development of differing raw materials and other resources; education must begin on a continuing basis for everyone in the society, especially including engineering and technical training; technical assistance from outside sources must be adequate to meet present and long-term needs; atomic power plants must spring up to make electrical energy available. With America’s idle productive capacity, it is possible to begin this process immediately without changing our military allocations. This might catalyze a “peace race” since it would demand a response of such magnitude from the Soviet Union that arms spending and “coexistence” spending would become strenuous, perhaps impossible, for the Soviets to carry on simultaneously.

3. We should not depend significantly on private enterprise to do the job.Many important projects will not be profitable enough to entice the investment of private capital. The total amount required is far beyond the resources of corporate and philanthropic concerns. The new nations are suspicious, legitimately, of foreign enterprises dominating their national life. World industrialization is too huge an undertaking to be formulated or carried out by private interests. Foreign economic assistance is a national problem, requiring long range planning, integration with other domestic and foreign policies, and considerable public debate and analysis. Therefore the federal government should have primary responsibility in this area.

4. We should not lock the development process into Cold War conflict: we should view it as a way to end that conflict.When President Kennedy declared that we must aid those who need aid because it is right, he is unimpeachably correct—now principle must become practice. We should reverse the trend of aiding corrupt anti-communist regimes. To support dictators like Diem while trying to destroy ones like Castro will only enforce international cynicism about American “principle”, and is bound to lead to even more authoritarian anti-American revolutions, especially in Latin America where we did not even consider foreign aid until Castro had challenged the status quo. We should end the distinction between communist hunger and anti-communist hunger. To feed only anti-communists is to directly fatten men like Boun Oum, to incur the wrath of real democrats, and to distort our own sense of human values. We must cease seeing development in terms of communism and capitalism. To fight communism by capitalism in the newly-developing areas is to fundamentally misunderstand the international hatred of imperialism and colonialism, and to confuse the needs of 19th century industrial America with those of contemporary nations.

Quite fortunately, we are edging away from the Dullesian “either or” foreign policy ultimatum, towards an uneasy acceptance of neutralism and nonalignment. If we really desire the end of the Cold War, we should now welcome nonalignment—that is the creation of whole blocs of nations concerned with growth and with independently trying to break out of the Cold War apparatus.

Finally, while seeking disarmament as the genuine deterrent, we should shift from financial support of military regimes to support of national development. Real security cannot be gained propping up military defenses, but only through the hastening of political stability, economic growth, greater social welfare, improved education. Military aid is temporary in nature, a “shoring up” measure that only postpones crises. In addition, it tends to divert the allocation of the nation being defended to supplementary military spending (Pakistan’s budget is 70-percent oriented to defense measures). Sometimes it actually creates crisis situations, as in Latin America where we have contributed to the growth of national armies which are opposed generally to sweeping democratization. Finally, if we are really generous, it is harder for corrupt governments to unfairly exploit economic aid—especially if it is so plentiful that the rulers cannot blame the absence of real reforms on anything but their own power lust.

5. The United States should be prepared to support authoritarian regimes.Where societies are without material goods, or an educated population, our criticisms of authoritarianism should be constructive ones: that is, supportive of the revolutionary processes bringing new peoples into radically new social situations. We should acknowledge that democracy and freedom do not magically occur, but are consequences of historical development: therefore they cannot always be demanded, but facilitated, nurtured. Equally important, we should avoid the projection of distinctively Anglo-American democratic forms willy-nilly onto different cultures, e.g., Africa where there is little tradition of constitutionalism, but a dominant tradition of community consensus. Instead of democratic capitalisms we should anticipate more or less authoritarian kinds of socialism in many of the emergent areas and offer our support in a non-doctrinaire manner (as it appears we now are doing in Guinea and Ghana). We should not support authoritarianisms in which a minority are the economic and educational beneficiaries (as is the case with many countries in Latin America) because only mass participation in struggles against poverty and illiteracy will bring about the conditions of a democratic social order. These distinctions are not thorough, but they point to a major intellectual task, the development of a reasonable theory to justify the acceptance of certain authoritarianisms, and how to measure the quality of progress under authoritarian rule. What is the terminal point beyond which we will not tolerate suppression of civil liberties? How can Western democracy be applied to revolutionary or even stable situations in different cultures, and how not? This and other questions confront the whole tradition of democratic theory—in a challenging, not a subversive, way.
6. America should show its commitment to democratic institutions not by withdrawing recognition of undemocratic regimes, but by making domestic democracy exemplary. Worldwide amusement, cynicism and hatred toward the United States as a democracy is not simply a communist propaganda trick, but an objectively justifiable phenomenon. If respect for democracy is to be international, then the significance of democracy must emanate from American shores, not from the “soft sell” of the United States Information Agency.
7. America should agree that public utilities, railroads, mines and plantations and other basic economic institutions should be in the control of national, not foreign, agencies. The destiny of any country should be determined by its nationals, not by outsiders with economic interests within. We should encourage our investors to turn over their foreign holdings (or at least 50 percent of their stock) to the national governments of the countries involved.

8. Foreign aid should be given through international agencies, primarily the United Nations.The need is to eliminate political overtones to the extent possible, from economic development. The use of international agencies, with interests transcending those of American or Russian self-interest, is the feasible means of working on sound development. Second, internationalization will allow more long-range planning, integrate development plans of adjacent countries and regions, and eliminate the duplication built into national systems of foreign aid. Third, it would justify more strictness of supervision than is now the case with American foreign aid efforts, but with far less chance of suspicion on the part of the developing countries. Fourth, the humiliating “handout” effect would be replaced by the joint participation of all nations in the general development of the earth’s resources and industrial capacities. Fifth, it would eliminate national tensions, e.g. between Japan and some Southeast Asian areas, which now impair aid programs by “disguising” nationalities in the common pooling of funds. Sixth, it would make easier the task of stabilizing the world market prices of basic commodities, alleviating the enormous threat that decline in prices of commodity exports might cancel out the gains from foreign aid in the new nations. Seventh, it would improve the possibilities of non-exploitative, development, especially in creating “soft credit” rotating-fund agencies which would not require immediate progress or financial return. Finally, it would enhance the importance of the United Nations itself, just as the disarming process would enhance the UN as a rule-enforcement agency.

Towards American Democracy

Every effort to end the Cold war and expand the process of world industrialization is an effort hostile to people and institutions whose interests lie in perpetuation of the East-west military threat and the postponement of change in the “have not” nations of the world. Every such effort, too, is bound to establish greater democracy in America. The goals of a domestic effort would be:

1. America must abolish its political party stalemate.A genuine, two party system, centered around issues and essential values, demanding allegiance to party principles, must supplant the current system of organized stalemate which is seriously inadequate to a world in flux. It has long been argued that the very overlapping of American parties guarantees that issues will be considered responsibly, that progress will be gradual instead of intemperate, and that therefore America will remain stable instead of torn by class strife. On the contrary: the enormous party overlap itself confuses issues and makes responsible presentation of choice to the electorate impossible, that guarantees Congressional listlessness and the drift of power to military and economic bureaucracies, that directs attention away from more fundamental causes of social stability, such as a huge middle class, Keynesian economic techniques and Madison Avenue advertising. The ideals of political democracy, then, and the imperative need for a flexible decision-making apparatus makes a real two-party system an immediate social necessity. What is desirable is sufficient party disagreement to dramatize major issues, yet sufficient party overlap to guarantee stable transitions from administration to administration.

Every time the President criticizes a recalcitrant Congress, we must ask that he no longer tolerate the Southern conservatives in the Democratic Party. Every time a liberal representative complains that “we can’t expect everything at once” we must ask whether we received much of anything from Congress in the last generation. Every time he refers to “circumstances beyond control” we must ask why he fraternizes with racist scoundrels. Every time he speaks of the “unpleasantness of personal and party fighting,” we should insist that pleasantry with Dixiecrats is inexcusable when the dark peoples of the world cry for American support.

2. Mechanisms of voluntary association must be created through which political information can be imparted and political participation encouraged.Political parties, even if realigned, would not provide adequate outlets for popular involvement. Institutions should be created that engage people with issues and express a political preference, not as with the huge business lobbies which now exercise undemocraticpower, but which carry political influence (appropriate to private, rather than public, groupings) in the national decision-making enterprise. Private in nature, these should be organized around single issues (medical care, transportation systems reform, etc.), concrete interest (labor and minority group organizations), multiple issues or general issues. These do not exist in quantity in America today. If they did exist, they would be a significant politicalization and educative force, bringing people into touch with public life and affording them means of expression and action. Today, giant lobby representatives of business interests are dominant, but no educative. The federal government itself should counter the latter forces whose intent is often public deceit for private gain, but subsidizing the preparation and decentralized distribution of objective materials on all public issues facing government.
3. Institutions and practices which stifle dissent should be abolished, and the promotion of peaceful dissent should be actively promoted.The first amendment freedoms of speech, assembly, thought, religion and press should be seen, as guarantors, not threats, to the national security. While society has the right to prevent active subversion of its laws and institutions, it has the duty as well to promote open discussion of all issues—otherwise it will be in fact promoting real subversion as the only means to implementing ideas. To eliminate the fears and apathy from national life it is necessary that the institutions bred by fear and apathy be rooted out: the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Senate Internal Security Committee, the loyalty oaths on federal loans, the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations, the Smith and McCarren acts. The process of eliminating these blighting institutions is the process of restoring democratic participation. Their existence is a sign of the decomposition and atrophy of the participation.

4. Corporations must be made publicly responsible.It is not possible to believe that true democracy can exist where a minority utterly controls enormous wealth and power. The influence of corporate elites on foreign policy is neither reliable nor democratic; a way must be found to subordinate private American foreign investment to a democratically-constructed foreign policy. The influence of the same giants on domestic life is intolerable as well; a way must be found to direct our economic resources to genuine human needs, not the private needs of corporations nor the rigged needs of a maneuvered citizenry.

Americans cannot trust the promise of the corporate bureaucracy to be “socially responsible.” It must become structurally responsible to the people as well. Empirical study should determine the various ways in which this responsibility might be gained; strengthened congressional regulatory commissions; increased worker participation in management and other forms of multilateral decision-making; deliberate decentralization; actual transfer to public ownership, are a few major alternatives that must be considered.

5. A truly “public sector” must be established and its nature debated and planned.If war is to be avoided, the “permanent war economy” must be seen as an “interim war economy.” At some point, America must return to other mechanisms of economic growth besides public military spending. The most likely, and least desirable, return would be in the form of private enterprise. The undesirability lies in the fact of inherent capitalist instability, noticeable even with the bolstering effects of government intervention. In the most recent of post-war recessions, for example, private expenditures for plant and equipment dropped from $16 billion to $11.5 billion, while unemployment surged to nearly six million. By good fortune, investments in construction industries remained level, else an economic depression would have occurred. This will recur, and our growth in national per capita living standards will remain unsensational while the economy stagnates. The mainprivate forces of economic expansion cannot guarantee a steady rate of growth, nor acceptable recovery from recession, especially in a demilitarizing world. Government participation in the economy is essential. Such participation will inevitably expand enormously, because the stable growth of the economy demands increasing investments yearly. Our present output of $450 billion might double in a generation, irreversibly involving government solutions. And in future recessions, the compensatory fiscal action by the government will be the only means of avoiding the twin disasters of greater unemployment and a slackening of the rate of growth. Furthermore, a close relationship with the European Common Market will involve competition with numerous planned economies, and may aggravate American unemployment unless the economy here is expanding swiftly enough to create new jobs.

All these tendencies suggest that our future expansion rests upon our willingness to enlarge the “public sector” greatly. Unless we choose war as an economic solvent, future public spending will be of a non-military nature—a major intervention into civilian production by the government. The issues posed by this development are enormous:

1. How should public vs. private domain be determined? We suggest these criteria: 1) when a resource has been discovered or developed with public tax revenues, such as the space communications systems, it should remain a public resource, not be given away to private enterprise; 2) when monopolization seems inevitable, the public should maintain control of an industry; 3) when national objectives contradict seriously with business objectives as to the use of a resource, the former should prevail.
2. How should technological advances be introduced into a society? By a public process, based on publicly-determined needs. Technological innovations should not be postponed from social use by private corporations in order to protect investment in older equipment.
3. How shall the “public sector” be made public, and not the arena of a ruling bureaucracy of “public servants”? By steadfast opposition to bureaucratic coagulation, and to definitions of human needs according to problems easiest for computers to solve. Second, the bureaucratic pile-ups must be at least minimized by local, regional, and national economicplanning—responding to the interconnection of public problems by comprehensive programs or solution. Third, and most important, by experiments indecentralization based on the vision of man as master of his machines and his society. The personal capacity to cope with life has been reduced everywhere by the introduction of a technology that only minorities of man (barely) understand. How the process can be reversed—and we believe it can be—is one of the great sociological and economic tasks before humane people today. Polytechnical schooling, with the individual adjusting to several work and life experiences, is one method. The transfer of certain mechanized tasks back into manuals forms, allowing men to make whole, not partial, products, is not unimaginable. Our monster cities, based historically on the need for mass labor, might now be humanized, broken into smaller communities, powered by nuclear energy, arranged according to community decision. These are but a fraction of the opportunities of the new era: serious study and deliberate experimentation, rooted in a desire for human fraternity, may now result in blueprints of civic paradise.

6. America should abolish squalor, terminate neglect, and establish an environment for people to live in with dignity and creativeness.

a. A program against poverty must be just as sweeping as the nature of poverty itself. It must not be just palliative, but directed to the abolition of the structural circumstances of poverty. At a bare minimum it should include ahousingact far larger than the one supported by the Kennedy Administration, but one that is geared more to low- and middle-income needs than to the windfall aspirations of small and large private entrepreneurs, one that is more sympathetic to the quality of communal life than to the efficiency of city-splitting highways. Second, medical care must become recognized as a lifetime human rights just as vital as food, shelter and clothing—the Federal government should guarantee health insurance as a basic social service, turning medical treatment into a social habit, not just an occasion of crisis, fighting sickness among the aged not just by making medical care financially feasible but by reducing sickness among children and younger people. Third, existing institutions should be expanded so that the Welfare State cares for everyone’s welfare according to need. Social Security payments should be extended to everyone and should be proportionately greater for the poorest. A minimum wage of at least $1.50 should be extended to all workers (including the 16 million currently not covered at all).

b. A full-scale public initiative forcivil rightsshould be undertaken despite the clamor among conservatives (and liberals) about gradualism, property rights, and law and order. The executive and legislative branches of the Federal government should work by enforcement and enactment against any form of exploitation of minority groups. No federal cooperation with racism is tolerable—from financing of schools, to the development of federally-supported industry, to the social gatherings of the President. Laws hastening school desegregation, voting rights, and economic protection for Negroes are needed right now. And the moral force of the Executive Office should be exerted against the Dixiecrats specifically, and the national complacency about the race question generally. Especially in the North, where one-half of the country’s Negro people now live, is not a problem to be solved in isolation from other problems. The fight against poverty, against slums, against the stalemated Congress, against McCarthyism, are all fights against the discrimination that is nearly endemic to all areas of American life.

c. The promise and problems of long-range federal economic development should be studied more constructively. It is an embarrassing paradox that the Tennessee Valley Authority is a wonder to foreign visitors by a “radical” and barely influential project to most Americans. The Kennedy decision to permit private facilities to transmit power from the $1 billion Colorado River Storage Project is a disastrous one, interposing privately-owned transmitters between publicly-owned power generators and their publicly (and cooperatively) owned distributors. The contrary trend, to public ownership of power, should be generated in an experimental way.

d. The Area Redevelopment Act of 1961 is a first step in recognizing the underdeveloped areas of the United States. It has been rejected by Mississippi already, however, because of the improvement it bodes for the unskilled Negro worker. This program should be enlarged, given teeth, and pursued rigorously by Federal authorities.

e. Mental health institutions are in dire need; there were fewer mental hospital beds in relation to the numbers of mentally-ill in 1959 than there were in 1948. Public hospitals, too, are seriously wanting; existing structures alone need an estimated $1 billion for rehabilitation. Tremendous staff and faculty needs exist as well, and there are not enough medical students enrolled today to meet the anticipated needs of the future.

f. Our prisons are too often the enforcers of misery. They must be either re-oriented to rehabilitative work through public supervision or be abolished for their dehumanizing social effects. Funds are needed, too, to make possible a decent prison environment.

g. Education is too vital a public problem to be completely entrusted to the province of the various states and local units. In fact, there is no good reason why America should not progress now toward internationalizing, rather than localizing, its educational system—children and young adults studying everywhere in the world, through a United Nations program, would go far to create mutual understanding. In the meantime, the need for teachers and classrooms in America is fantastic. This is an area where “minimal” requirements hardly should be considered as a goal—there always are improvements to be made in the educational system, e.g., smaller classes and many more teachers for them, programs to subsidize the education of the poor but bright, etc.

h. America should eliminate agricultural policies based on scarcity and pent-up surplus. In America and foreign countries there exist tremendous needs for more food and balanced diets. The Federal government should finance small farmers cooperatives, strengthen programs of rural electrification, and expand policies for the distribution of agricultural surpluses throughout the world (by Food-for-Peace and related UN programming).

i. Science should be employed to constructively transform the conditions of life throughout the United States and the world. Yet at the present time the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the National Science Foundation together spend only $300 million annually for scientific purposes in contrast to the $6 billion spent by the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission. One-half of all research and development in America is directly devoted to military purposes. Two imbalances must be corrected—that of military over non-military investigation, and that of biological-natural-physical science over the sciences of human behavior. Our political system must then include planning for the human use of science: by anticipating the political consequences of scientific innovation, by directing the discovery and exploration of space, by adapting science to improved production of food, to international communications systems, to technical problems of disarmament, and so on. For the newly-developing nations, American science should focus on the study of cheap sources of power, housing and building materials, mass educational techniques, etc. Further, science and scholarship should be seen less as an apparatus of conflicting power blocs, but as a bridge toward supranational community: the International Geophysical Year is a model for continuous further cooperation between the science communities of all nations.

An Alternative to Helplessness

The goals we have set are not realizable next month, or even next election, but that fact justified neither giving up altogether nor a determination to work only on immediate, direct, tangible problems. Both responses are a sign of helplessness, fearfulness of visions, refusal to hope: and tend to bring on the very conditions to be avoided. Fearing vision, we justify rhetoric or myopia. Fearing hope, we reinforce despair.

The first effort, then, should be to state a vision: what is the perimeter of human possibility in this epoch? This we have tried to do. The second effort, if we are to be politically responsible, is to evaluate the prospects for obtaining at least a substantial part of that vision in our epoch: what are the social forces that exist, or that must exist, if we are to be at all successful? And what role have we ourselves to play as a social force?

1. In exploring the existing social forces, note must be taken of the Southern civil rights movement as the most heartening and exemplary struggle in this time of inactive democracy. It is heartening because of the justice it insists upon, exemplary because it indicates that there can be a passage out of apathy.

This movement, pushed into a brilliant new phase by the Montgomery bus boycott and the subsequent nonviolent action of the sit-ins and Freedom Rides has had three major results: first, a sense of self-determination has been instilled in millions of oppressed Negroes; second, the movement has challenged a few thousand liberals to new social idealism; third, a series of important concessions have been obtained, such as token school desegregation, increased Administration help, new laws, desegregation of some public facilities.

But fundamental social change—that would break the props from under Jim Crow—has not come. Negro employment opportunity, wage levels, housing conditions, educational privileges—these remain deplorable and relatively constant, each deprivation reinforcing the impact of the others. The Southern states, in the meantime, are strengthening the fortresses of the status quo, and, are beginning to camouflage the fortresses by guile where open bigotry announced its defiance before. The white-controlled one-party system remains intact: indeed, conservative Republicans may have a greater interest in maintaining their coalition with Dixiecrats than in organizing a Republican Party in the South. Rural dominance remains a fact in nearly all the Southern states. Southern politicians maintain a continuing aversion to the welfare legislation that would aid their people. The reins of the Southern economy are held by conservative businessmen who view human rights as secondary to property rights. A violent anti-communism is rooting itself in the South, and threatening even moderate voices. Add the militarist tradition of the South and its irrational regional mystique, and one must conclude that authoritarian and reactionary tendencies are a rising obstacle to the small, voiceless, poor, and isolated democratic movements.

The civil rights struggle thus has come to an impasse. To this impasse, the movement responded this year by entering the sphere of politics, insisting on citizenship rights, specifically the right to vote. The new voter registration stage of protest represents perhaps the first major attempt to exercise the conventional instruments of political democracy in the struggle for racial justice. The vote, if used strategically by the great mass of now-unregistered Negroes theoretically eligible to vote, will be a decisive factor in changing the quality of Southern leadership from low demagoguery to decent statesmanship.

More important, the new emphasis on the vote heralds the use of political means to solve the problems of equality in America, and it signals the decline of the short-sighted view that “discrimination” can be isolated from related social problems. Since the moral clarity of the civil rights movement has not always been accompanied by precise political vision, and sometimes not even by a real political consciousness, the new phase is revolutionary in its implications. The greatest of these implications seems to be the threat posed to the Dixiecrat domination of the political channels. An increased Negro vote drive in and of itself is not going to dislodge the racist power, but an accelerating movement through the courts, the ballot boxes and especially the jails is the most likely means of shattering the crust of political irresponsibility and restoring a semblance of democratic order, on local and state levels.

2. The broadest movement forpeacein several years emerged in 1961–62. In its political orientation and goals it is much less identifiable than the movement for civil rights: it includes socialists, pacifists, liberals, scholars, militant activists, middle class women, some professionals, many students, a few unionists. Some have been emotionally single-issue: Ban the Bomb. Some have been academically obscurantist. Some have rejected The System (sometimes both Systems). Some have attempted, too, to “work within” The System. Amidst these conflicting streams of emphasis however, certain basic qualities appear. The most important is that the “peace movement” has operated almost exclusively through peripheral institutions—almost never through mainstream institutions. Similarly, individuals interested in peace have nonpolitical social roles that cannot be turned to the support of peace activity. Concretely, liberal religious societies , anti-war groups, voluntary associations, ad hoc committees have been the political unit of the peace movement, and its human movers have been students, teachers, housewives, secretaries, lawyers, doctors, clergy. The units have not been located in spots of major social influence, the people have not been able to turn their resources fully to the issues that concern them. The results are political ineffectiveness and personal alienation.

The organizing ability of the peace movement thus is limited to the ability to state and polarize issues. It does not have an institution or the forum in which the conflicting interests can be debated. The debate goes on in corners; it has little connection with the continuing process of determining allocations of resources. This process is not necessarily centralized, however much the peace movement is estranged from it. National policy, though dominated to a large degree by the “power elites” of the corporations and military, is still partially founded in consensus. It can be altered when there actually begins a shift in the allocation of resources and the listing of priorities by the people in the institutions which have social influence, e.g., the labor unions and the schools. As long as the debates of the peace movement form only a protest, rather than an opposition viewpoint within the centers of serious decision-making, then it is neither a movement of democratic relevance, nor is it likely to have any effectiveness except in educating more outsiders to the issue. It is vital, to be sure, that this educating go on (a heartening sign is the recent proliferation of books and journals dealing with peace and war problems). As a domestic concern for peace grows, coupled to the heavy pressures from newly-developing countries, the possibility for making politicians responsible to “peace constituencies” becomes greater.

But in the long interim before the national political climate is more open to deliberate, goal-directed debate about peace issues, the dedicated peace “movement” might well prepare a local base: by establishing civic committees on the techniques of converting from military to peacetime production, especially. To make war and peacerelevant to the problems of everyday life, by relating it to the backyard (shelters), the baby (fallout), the job (military contracts) — and making a turn toward peace seem desirable on these same terms — is a task the peace movement is just beginning, and can profitably continue.

3. Central to any analysis of the potential for change must be an appraisal oforganized labor. It would be ahistorical to disregard the immense influence of labor in making modern America a decent place in which to live. It would be confused to fail to note labor’s presence today as the most liberal of mainstream institutions. But it would be irresponsible not to criticize labor for losing the idealism that once made it a driving movement. Those who expected a labor upsurge after the 1955 AFL-CIO merger can only be dismayed that one year later, in the Stevenson-Eisenhower campaign, the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education was able to obtain solicited $1 contributions from only one of every 24 unionists, and prompt only 40% percent of the rank-and-file to vote.

As a political force, labor generally has been unsuccessful in the post-war period of prosperity. It has seen the passage of the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin laws, and while beginning to receive slightly favorable National Labor Relations Board rulings, it has made little progress against right-to-work laws. Furthermore, it has seen less than adequate action on domestic problems, especially unemployment.

This labor “recession” has been only partly due to anti-labor politicians and corporations. Blame should be laid, too, to labor itself for not mounting an adequate movement. Labor has seen itself as elitist, rather than mass-oriented, and as a pressure group rather than as an 18-million member body making political demands for all America. In the first instance, the labor bureaucracy is cynical toward, or afraid of, rank-and-file involvement in the work of the union. Resolutions passed at conventions are implemented only by high-level machinations, not by mass mobilization of the unionists. Without a significant base, labor’s pressure function is materially reduced since it becomes difficult to hold political figures accountable to a movement that cannot muster a vote from a majority of its members.

There are some indications, however, that labor might regain its missing idealism. First, there are signs within the movement: of worker discontent with the economic progress of collective bargaining, of occasional splits among union leaders on questions such as nuclear testing or other Cold War issues. Second, and more important, are the social forces which prompt these feelings of unrest. Foremost is the permanence of unemployment, and the threat of automation, but important too is the growth of unorganized ranks in white collar fields with steady depletion in the already-organized fields. Third, there is the tremendous challenge of the Negro movement for support from organized labor: the alienation from and disgust with labor hypocrisy among Negroes ranging from the NAACP to the Black Muslims (crystallized in the formation of the Negro American Labor Council) indicates that labor must move more seriously in its attempts to organize on an interracial basis in the South and in large urban areas. When this task was broached several years ago, “jurisdictional” disputes prevented action. Today, many of those disputes have been settled—and the question of a massive organizing campaign is on the labor agenda again.

These threats and opportunities point to a profound crisis: either labor continues to decline as a social force, or it must constitute itself as a mass political force demanding not only that society recognize its rights to organize but also a program going beyond desired labor legislation and welfare improvements. Necessarily this latter role will require rank-and-file involvement. It might include greater autonomy and power for political coalitions of the various trade unions in local areas, rather than the more stultifying dominance of the international unions now. It might include reductions in leader’s salaries, or rotation from executive office to shop obligations, as a means of breaking down the hierarchical tendencies which have detached elite from base and made the highest echelons of labor more like businessmen than workers. It would certainly mean an announced independence of the center and Dixiecrat wings of the Democratic Party, and a massive organizing drive, especially in the South to complement the growing Negro political drive there.

But such is not the case at present. Few anticipate it, and fewer still exhort labor to begin. Labor continues to be the most liberal—and most frustrated—mainstream institution in America.

4. Since the Democratic Party sweep in 1958, there have been exaggerated but real efforts to establish a liberal-left force in Congress, not to balance but to at least voice criticism of the conservatives. The most notable of these efforts was the Liberal Project begun early in 1959 by Representative Kastenmeier of Wisconsin. The Project was neither disciplined, nor very influential, but it was concerned at least with confronting basic domestic and foreign problems, in concert with several liberal intellectuals.

The Project was never more than embryonic. In 1960 five of its members were defeated (for reasons other than their membership in the Project). Then followed a “post mortem” publication of a collection of The Liberal Papers, materials discussed by the Project when it was in existence. The Republicans called the book “further out than communism”. The New Frontier Administration repudiated any connection with the Papers. Former members of the Project even disclaimed their roles, except for two. A hopeful beginning came to a shameful end.

But during the demise of the Project, a new spirit of Democratic Party reform was occurring in several places: New York City, Ithaca, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Texas, California, and even in Mississippi and Alabama where Negro candidates for Congress challenged racist political power. Some were for peace, some for the liberal side of the New Frontier, some for realignment of the parties—and in most cases, they were supported by students.

Americans for Democratic Action and The New Republic, pillars of the liberal community, took stands against the President on nuclear testing. A split, slight thus far, developed in organized labor on the same issue. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached against the Dixiecrat-Republican coalition across the nation. Here and there were stirrings of unprogrammatic discontent with the political stalemate.

5. From 1960 to 1962, the campuses experienced a revival of idealism among an active few. Triggered by the impact of the sit-ins, students began to struggle for integration, civil liberties, students rights, peace and against the fast-rising right-wing “revolt” as well. The liberal students, too, have felt their urgency thwarted by conventional channels: from student governments to congressional committees. Out of this sense of alienation from existing channels has come the creation of new ones; the most characteristic forms of liberal-radical student organizations are the dozens of campus political parties, political journals, and peace demonstrations. In only a few cases have students built bridges to power: an occasional election campaign, or a show of action by campus ADA or the Young Democrats, or infrequently through the United States National Student Association whose notable work has not been focused on political change.

These contemporary social movements—for peace, civil rights, civil liberties, labor—have in common certain values and goals. The fight for civil rights is also one for social welfare for all Americans; for free speech and the right to protest; for the shield of economic independence and bargaining power; for reduction of the arms race which takes national attention and resources away from the settlement of domestic injustice. The fight of labor for jobs and wages is also one to end exploitation of the Negro as a source of cheap labor; for the right to petition and strike; for world industrialization; for the stability of a peacetime economy instead of the insecurity of a war economy; for expansion of the Welfare State. The fight for a liberal congress is a fight for a platform from which these concerns can issue. And the fight for student rights, for internal democracy in the university, is a fight to

[Editor’s note: Page 48 of the document is missing from available copies. We have inserted below the language from the final version. It appears that the draft version was essentially the same on this page.]

gain a forum for the issues.

But these scattered movements have more in common: a need for their concerns to be expressed by a political party responsible to their interests. That they have no political expression, no political channels, can be traced in large measure to the existence of a Democratic Party which tolerates the perverse unity of liberalism and racism, prevents the social change wanted by Negroes, peace protesters, labor unions, students, reform Democrats, and other liberals. Worse, the party stalemate prevents even the raising of controversy—a full Congressional assault on racial discrimination, disengagement in Central Europe, sweeping urban reform, disarmament and inspection, public regulation of major industries; these and other issues are never heard in the body that is supposed to represent the best thoughts and interests of all Americans.

An imperative task for these publicly disinherited groups, then, is to demand a Democratic Party responsible to their interests. They must support Southern voter registration and Negro political candidates and demand that Democratic Party liberals do the same (in the last Congress, Dixiecrats split with Northern Democrats on 119 of 300 roll-calls, mostly on civil rights, area redevelopment and foreign aid bills; and the breach was much larger than in the previous several sessions). Labor should begin a major drive in the South. In the North, reform clubs (either independent or Democratic) should be formed to run against big city regimes on such issues as peace, civil rights, and urban needs. Demonstrations should be held at every Congressional or convention seating of Dixiecrats. A massive research and publicity campaign should be initiated, showing to every housewife, doctor, professor, and worker the damage done to their interests every day a racist occupies a place in the Democratic Party. Where possible, the peace movement should challenge the “peace credentials” of the otherwise-liberals by threatening or actually running candidates against them.

THE UNIVERSITY AND SOCIAL CHANGE.

There is perhaps little reason to be optimistic about the above analysis. True, the Dixiecrat-GOP coalition is the weakest point in the dominating complex of corporate, military and political power. But the civil rights and peace and student movements are too poor and socially slighted, and the labor movement too quiescent, to be counted with enthusiasm. From where else can power and vision be summoned? We believe that the universities are an overlooked seat of influence.

First, the university is located in a permanent position of social influence. Its educational function makes it indispensable and automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes. Second, in an unbelievably complicated world, it is the central institution for organizing, evaluating, and transmitting knowledge. Third, the extent to which academic resources presently is used to buttress immoral social practice is revealed first, by the extent to which defense contracts make the universities engineers of the arms race. Too, the use of modern social science as a manipulative tool reveals itself in the “human relations” consultants to the modern corporation, who introduce trivial sops to give laborers feelings of “participation” or “belonging,” while actually deluding them in order to further exploit their labor. And, of course, the use of motivational research is already infamous as a manipulative aspect of American politics. But these social uses of the universities’ resources also demonstrate the unchangeable reliance by men of power on the men and storehouses of knowledge: this makes the university functionally tied to society in new ways, revealing new potentialities, new levers for change. Fourth, the university is the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint.

These, at least, are facts, no matter how dull the teaching, how paternalistic the rules, how irrelevant the research that goes on. Social relevance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness—these together make the university a potential base and agency for a movement of social change.

1. Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.
2. A new left must be distributed in significant social roles throughout the country.
3. A new left must consist of younger people who matured in the post-war world, and partially be directed to the recruitment of younger people. The university is the obvious beginning point.
4. A new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system. The university is a more sensible place than a political party for these two traditions to discuss their differences and look for political synthesis.
5. A new left must start controversy across the land, if national policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond.
6. A new left must transform modern complexity into issues that can be understood and felt close-up by every human being. It must give form to the feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political, social, and economic sources of their private troubles and organize to change society. In a time of supposed prosperity, moral complacency and political manipulation, a new left cannot rely on aching stomachs to be the engine force of social reform. The case for change, for alternatives that will involve uncomfortable personal efforts, must be argued as never before. The university is a relevant place for all of these activities.

To turn these possibilities into realities will involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty. They must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy. They must legitimize the right to speak and act in public, partisan ways. They must make fraternal and functional contact with allies in labor, civil rights, and other liberal forces outside the campus. They must import major public issues into the curriculum—research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding example. They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style of the educational life.

As students, for a democratic society, we are committed to stimulating this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program in campus and community across the country. If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.

Transcribed by Jim Kalafus, May 2006
Editorial corrections by Stewart A. Levin, January 2016
[Spelling and word-usage errors in the original document have been retained.]

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 Notes

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Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Available by Guttenberg Project September 7, 2019. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#chap36 Last accessed on May 31, 2020.

Viet Nam Generation, Inc. Port Huron Statement. Sixties Project, 1993. http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Available by Guttenberg Project September 2002. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3420/pg3420-images.html Last accessed on May 31, 2020.

References – Figures

File: Bundesarchiv Bild 183-14077-006, Rosa Luxemburg. Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons, July 10, 2017. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-14077-006,_Rosa_Luxemburg.jpg.

File: Friedrich Nietzsche, Circa 1875. Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons, July 12, 2019. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Friedrich_Nietzsche,_Circa_1875.jpg.

Kajiwara, T. File: Emma Goldman 2. Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons, December 11, 2008. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Emma_Goldman_2.jpg.

Mayal, John Jabez Edwin. File: Karl Marx. Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons, September 4, 2016. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karl_Marx.png.

SDS. File: Free University SDS. Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons, November 17, 2019. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Free_University_SDS.jpg.

Watts, George Frederic. File: Stuart Mill G F Watts. Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons, October 4, 2014. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stuart_Mill_G_F_Watts.jpg.