>>2811789>>2811731>>2811649https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Fascism_and_Social_Revolutionhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/dutt/1935/fascism-social-revolution-3.pdfThe most direct, elementary and typical expression of the present stage of capitalist policy is the organised collective destruction of wealth and of the productive forces.
The purposeful destruction of commodities for economic reasons is in itself nothing new in capitalism, but an integral part of its daily working from the beginning.
It was in 1799 that Fourier first became convinced of the necessity of a new form of social organisation when he found himself entrusted with the task at Marseilles to superintend the destruction of a quantity of rice held for higher prices during a scarcity of food till it had become unfit for use. Nevertheless, this rice had at any rate been held back in the hope of sale, and was only destroyed because it had become unfit for use.
This was not yet the modern principle of the wholesale destruction of good rice, good wheat, good cotton, good coffee and good meat.In the same way the endeavour by combination to limit stocks, restrict production, and maintain or raise prices is inherent, not merely in capitalism, but in commodity economy from the beginning. As Adam Smith wrote in his Wealth of Nations:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices.
(Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 10, Part ii.)
But such a policy appeared to Adam Smith, the original voice of classic capitalism, as an offence against the principles of capitalist production, as “a conspiracy against the public.” It has remained for our day that all the capitalist governments of the world should meet together in the World Economic Con- ference to proclaim, with the combined voice of all the most enlightened, progressive statesmen and all the economists, the supreme aim to restrict production and to raise prices. Thisisa measure of the extreme stage of decay of capitalism.
The distinctive modern stage of capitalist policy for the destruction of wealth and of the productive forces is marked by three outstanding characteristics.
The first is the gigantic scale of destruction, conducted over entire principal world areas of production, and calculated in relation to world stocks.
The second is the direct government organisation and sub- siding of such destruction and restriction of production by all the leading imperialist governments.
The third is the extension of destruction, not only to the destruction of existing stocks of commodities, but to the destruc- tion of the productive forces, the ploughing up of crops and sown areas, the artificial limitation of production, the dismantling of machinery, as well as holding unused the labour power of millions of workers.
The examples of this process throughout the capitalist world are too familiar to require repetition. The burning of millions of bags of coffee or tons of grain, in the midst of mass starvation and poverty, have horrified the world. But all this has been no accidental or exceptional happening through the action of individuals, but on the contrary directly organised by all the capitalist governments of the world, and in the forefront by the most “progressive” governments, by the Roosevelt Government in the United States, by Social Democratic governments, etc.
It is a tragic irony that men and women in New York should be suffering the tortures of hunger while tens of thousands of pigs in farrow are being slaughtered in Iowa by the command of the Gov- ernment, and farmers in Kansas or Nebraska are burning their grain. (News-Chronicle, October 17, 1933.)The expenditures account recently published of the Agricul- tural Adjustment Administration under the Roosevelt regime affords a pretty picture of modern capitalism (Economist, December 30, 1933):
[table of statistics and citations to be found in the pdf]
This inspiring combination of Mammon and Juggernaut, let it be remembered, is the worshipped idol of the Labour Party and of the Trades Union Congress, as proclaimed at their meetings at Hastings and Brighton in 1933.
From Denmark it was reported in November 1933 that cattle were being slaughtered in the Government abattoirs at the rate of 5,000 a week, for the carcasses to be burnt in the incinerators. The Government established a special destruction fund; but so great was the cost of destruction that Parliament had to be approached for further credits for the construction of new slaughter houses. This was under a Social Democratic Government (!!!).In the same way the British Labour Government had already carried the Coal Mines Act for the limitation of the output of coal——with such success that in the beginning of 1934 a London firm actually ordered a consignment of coal from abroad, on the grounds, as they stated, that owing to the limitation schemes it was impossible to secure a delivery from British sources with sufficient speed.
In Britain in 1930 the company “National Shipbuilders Security, Limited” was formed, with power to borrow up to three million pounds, for the purpose (according to the Memorandum of Association) “to assist the shipbuilding industry by the purchase of redundant and/or obsolete ship- yards, the dismantling and disposal of their contents, and the re-sale of their sites under restrictions against further use for shipbuilding.” Within a few months its successful activities were reported in the Press:
National Shipbuilders Security, Limited, has purchased Dalmuir Shipbuilding Yard, owned by William Beardmore and Co., and in consequence it is to be closed down by the end of the year. This shipyard was one of the largest on the Clyde, employing six thousand men during the war. Negotiations for the purchase and closing down of other shipyards are in progress.
Up to the end of 1933 this new type of capitalist company had bought up and closed down one hundred shipbuilding berths. In the twelve months to June 1933, the world tonnage of merchant shipping showed a net decrease of 1,814,000 tons, more than half this decrease being in tonnage owned by Britain.
Similarly, in the woollen textile industry the Woolcombers Mutual Association, Limited, was formed early in 1933 “to assist the woolcombing industry by the purchase and dis- mantling of redundant and obsolete mills, plant and machinery for re-sale under restrictive covenants against their further use for woolcombing.”
The principal copper producers of the world entered into an agreement at Brussels in December 1931, to limit production during 1932 to 26 per cent. of the capacity of their mines.
The National Coffee Council of Brazil, from which country comes two-thirds of the world’s coffee, decided in December 1931 to destroy twelve million bags of coffee. During 1932-3 9,600,000 quintals (equivalent to 1,248 million pounds weight) were destroyed, an emergency tax being imposed on coffee exports to finance the purchase and destruction of surplus coffee (League of Nations World Production and Prices 1925-32, p. 28). Up to the end of 1933 no less than 22,000,000 bags of coffee had been disposed of by burning or dumping in the sea.
The Governors of Texas and Oklahoma called out the National Guard to take possession of the oil-wells and prevent production.
The United States Department of Agriculture in the summer of 1933 announced bounties of seven to twenty dollars per acre to farmers for the destruction of the cotton crop. This was successful in securing the ploughing in or mowing down of 11 million acres out of a total of 40 millions:
The Government hoped to take ten million acres out of production by paying growers $7 to $20 per acre (according to the yield of their land) for ploughing under or mowing down cotton already growing. . . . The scheme was immediately successful in restricting acreage, over 11 million acres being ploughed in or mown down, reducing the estimated acreage from 40.8 to 29.7 million acres. (World Economic Survey 1932-3, pp. 313-4.)*
To the modern bourgeois mind and outlook this process of wholesale destruction and restricting of production, in the midst of poverty, appears as a natural and self-evident necessity. Without sense of contradiction they proclaim it in the same breath that they proclaim the necessity of “economy” and “cuts” to the masses; and correctly they feel no contradiction, since both are indispensable to the maintenance of capitalism at the present stage. They preach to-day the policy of restric- tion of production with the same sense of obvious correctness and common sense with which they preached after the war the policy of “increased production” as the path to prosperity. Thus in the summer of 1933 we find the British Chancellor of the Exchequer answering the “theorists” who imagine restric- tion of production to be “a bad thing”:
To allow production to go on unchecked and unregulated in these modern conditions when it could almost at a moment’s notice be increased to an almost indefinite extent was absolute folly.
(Neville Chamberlain in the House of Commons, June 2,
1933: Times, June 3, 1933.) In the same way the Economist was able to report with satis- faction:
While there was an enormous over-expansion of productive capacity before 1929, investment in capital equipment has been severely curtailed since then, and a substantial proportion of existing plant and machinery has become obsolete or has been scrapped. There can be little doubt that substantial progress has already been made in the re-adjustment of productive capacity to the lower level of demand for consumers’ goods.—( Economist, May 13, 1933.)
“Productive capacity” must be “re-adjusted” to the “lower level” of consumption of the impoverished masses. Such is the bed of Procrustes (who was also a bandit, but a less skilled and large-scale bandit) to which modern capitalism in its extreme stage of decay seeks to fit the tortured body of humanity. The more obvious and glaring expressions of this process, the burning of foodstuffs, the dismantling of machinery that is still in good condition, strike the imagination of all. But all do not yet see the full significance of these symptoms: first, the expres- sion through these symptoms of the extreme stage of decay of the whole capitalist order; second, the inseparable connection of this process of decay with the social and political pheno- mena of decay which find their complete expression in Fascism; and third, the necessary completion and final working out of this process in war. For war is only the complete and most systematic working out of the process of destruction. To-day they are burning wheat and grain, the means of human life. To-morrow they will be burning living human bodies.