Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

To Marx, the revolution of the proletariat was not only inevitable but would inevitably be successful, and would give rise to an entirely new society with a proletariat system of government, social life, intellectual patterns, and religious organization. The “inevitable revolution” must lead to an “inevitable victory of the proletariat” because the privileged position of the bourgeoisie allowed them to practice a merciless exploitation of the proletariat, pressing these laboring masses downward to a level of bare subsistence, because labor, having become nothing but a commodity for sale for wages in the competitive market, would naturally fall to the level which would just allow the necessary supply of labor to survive. From such exploitation, the bourgeoisie would become richer and richer and fewer and fewer in numbers, and acquire ownership of all property in the society while the proletariat would become poorer and poorer and more and more numerous and be driven closer and closer to desperation. Eventually, the bourgeoisie would become so few and the proletariat would become so numerous that the latter could rise up in their wrath and take over the instruments of production and thus control of the whole society.

According to this theory, the “inevitable revolution” would occur in the most advanced industrial country because only after a long period of industrialism would the revolutionary situation become acute and would the society itself be equipped with factories able to support a Socialist system. Once the revolution has taken place, there will be established a “dictatorship of the proletariat” during which the political, social, military, intellectual, and religious aspects of society will be transformed in a Socialist fashion. At the end of this period, full Socialism will be established, the state will disappear, and a “classless society” will come into existence. At this point history will end. This rather surprising conclusion to the historical process would occur because Marx had defined history as the process of class struggle and had defined the state as the instrument of class exploitation. Since, in the Socialist state, there will be no exploitation and thus no classes, there will be no class struggles and no need for a state.

In 1889, after the First International had been disrupted by the controversies between anarchists and Socialists, a Second International had been formed by the Socialists. This group retained its allegiance to Marxist theory for a considerable period, but even from the beginning Socialist actions did not follow Marxist theory. This divergence arose from the fact that Marxist theory did not provide a realistic or workable picture of social and economic developments. It had no real provision for labor unions, for workers’ political parties, for bourgeois reformers, for rising standards of living, or for nationalism, yet these became, after Marx’s death, the dominant concerns of the working class. Accordingly, the labor unions and the Social-Democratic political parties which they dominated became reformist rather than revolutionary groups. They were supported by upper-class groups with humanitarian or religious motivations, with the result that the conditions of life and of work among the laboring classes were raised to a higher level, at first slowly and reluctantly, but, in time, with increasing rapidity. So long as industry itself remained competitive, the struggle between industrialists and labor remained intense, because any success which the workers in one factory might achieve in improving their wage levels or their working conditions would raise the costs of their employer and injure his competitive position with respect to other employers. But as industrialists combined together after 1890 to reduce competition among themselves by regulating their prices and production, and as labor unions combined together into associations covering many factories and even whole industries, the struggle between capital and labor became less intense because any concessions made to labor would affect all capitalists in the same activity equally and could be covered simply by raising the price of the product of all factories to the final consumers.

In fact, the picture which Marx had drawn of more and more numerous workers reduced to lower and lower standards of living by fewer and fewer exploitative capitalists proved to be completely erroneous in the more advanced industrial countries in the twentieth century. Instead, what occurred could be pictured as a cooperative effort by unionized workers and monopolized industry to exploit unorganized consumers by raising prices higher and higher to provide both higher wages and higher profits. This whole process was advanced by the actions of governments which imposed such reforms as eight-hour days, minimum-wage laws, or compulsory accident, old age, and retirement insurance on whole industries at once. As a consequence, the workers did not become worse off but became much better off with the advance of industrialism in the twentieth century.

This tendency toward rising standards of living also revealed another Marxist error. Marx had missed the real essence of the Industrial Revolution. He tended to find this in the complete separation of labor from ownership of tools and the reduction of labor to nothing but a commodity in the market. The real essence of industrialism was to be found in the application of nonhuman energy, such as that from coal, oil, or waterpower, to production. This process increased man’s ability to make goods, and did so to an amazing degree. But mass production could exist only if it were followed by mass consumption and rising standards of living. Moreover, it must lead, in the long run, to a decreasing demand for hand labor and an increasing demand for highly trained technicians who are managers rather than laborers. And, in the longer run, this process would give rise to a productive system of such a high level of technical complexity that it could no longer be run by the owners but would have to be run by technically trained managers. Moreover, the use of the corporate form of industrial organization as a means for bringing the savings of the many into the control of a few by sales of securities to wider and wider groups of investors (including both managerial and laboring groups) would lead to a separation of management from ownership and to a great increase in the number of owners.

All these developments were quite contrary to the expectations of Karl Marx. Where he had expected impoverishment of the masses and concentration of ownership, with a great increase in the number of workers and a great decrease in the number of owners, with a gradual elimination of the middle class, there occurred instead (in highly industrialized countries) rising standards of living, dispersal of ownership, a relative decrease in the numbers of laborers, and a great increase in the middle classes. In the long run, under the impact of graduated income taxes and inheritance taxes, the rich became poorer and poorer, relatively speaking, and the great problem of advanced industrial societies became, not the exploitation of laborers by capitalists, but the exploitation of unorganized consumers (of the professional and lower-middle-class levels) by unionized labor and monopolized managers acting in concert. The influence of these last two groups on the state in an advanced industrial country also served to increase their ability to obtain what they wished from society as a whole.

As a consequence of all these influences, the revolutionary spirit did not continue to advance with the advance of industrialism, as Marx had expected, but began to decrease, with the result that the more advanced industrial countries became less and less revolutionary. Moreover, what revolutionary spirit did exist in advanced industrial countries was not to be found, as Marx had expected, among the laboring population but among the lower middle class (so-called “petty bourgeoisie”). The average bank clerk, architect’s draftsman, or schoolteacher was unorganized, found himself oppressed by organized labor, monopolized industry, and the growing power of the state, and found himself caught in the spiral of rising costs resulting from the efforts of his three oppressors to push the costs of social welfare and steady profits on to the unorganized consumer. The petty bourgeois found that he wore a white collar, had a better education, was expected to maintain more expensive standards of personal appearance and living conditions, but received a lower income than unionized labor. As a consequence of all this, the revolutionary feeling existing in advanced industrial countries appeared among the petty bourgeoisie rather than among the proletariat, and was accompanied by psychopathic overtones arising from the suppressed resentments and social insecurities of this group. But these dangerous and even explosive feelings among the petty bourgeoisie took an antirevolutionary rather than a revolutionary form and appeared as nationalistic, anti-Semitic, antidemocratic, and anti-labor-union movements rather than as antibourgeois or anti-capitalist movements such as Marx had expected.