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p In expounding his general law of capitalist accumulation, Marx pointed out that production and reproduction of capital yield a growth in capitalist wealth, domination and despotism; they are also inextricably connected with a simultaneous extension of the sphere of exploitation and an increase in the size and organisation of the working class. The quantitative growth of the working class was accompanied by a growing indignation, a social protest and a revolutionary movement of the oppressed.

p After the October Revolution in Russia and particularly as the general crisis of capitalism grew in intensity, this revolutionary movement gathered momentum.

p Today, more than ever before, the powerful influence of the revolutionary forces on the policy of the bourgeoisie is apparent. For this very reason the bourgeoisie is forced to apply new forms and methods of class domination. Changes in the bourgeoisie’s tactics present new complex problems to the working people and their vanguard—the Communist and Workers’ Parties. It is all the more necessary to make a close study of the modern bourgeois tactics of struggle against the revolutionary working-class movement, since the monopoly bourgeoisie has met with some success in a number of 142 countries in restraining the workers’ class struggle and maintaining, and even temporarily bolstering, the fundamental props of its class supremacy. What Lenin had to say about bourgeois tactics is still relevant today. He wrote, “Our tactical and strategic methods (if we take them on an international scale) still lag behind the excellent strategy of the bourgeoisie, which has learnt from the example of Russia and will not let itself be ’taken by surprise’."  [142•1 

p The bourgeoisie has never used routine tactics in its class policy. Lenin delineated two systems of bourgeois administration, two methods used by the capitalists to defend their interests: a) the conservative policy of military-police repression of the working-class movement, and blunt refusal to yield an inch to the working people, and b) the liberalisation policy of social reform, material concessions and some extension of popular political rights.

p In home policy, these two methods often interchange and intertwine in various combinations, depending on the shifts in internal and external political and economic conditions.

p At the initial stage of capitalism’s general crisis, the antilabour domestic policy was one chiefly of intensifying the conservative methods (imperialism hoped that violence and fascist methods would upset the revolutionary working-class movement which flared up strongly after the October Revolution). At the second, and especially at the present stage, the traditional conservative tactics have been supplemented by new and more complex ones.

p I. In the socio-economic sphere these tactics are the following: a) an urge to avoid any open drive on the rights and interests of the exploited masses in relation to wages, social benefits, working hours, holidays, etc.; b) use of flagrant social demagogy distorting the true character of the material concessions and masking the antagonistic relations between labour and capital by various pseudo-systems of economic incentives towards “universal affluence”, “dispersal of capitalist property”, and socio-psychological systems of “social partnership”, “human relations" and so on and so forth; and c) a sharp increase in direct exploitation of wage labour at factory level as a fundamental method of extracting relative surplus value from the workers.

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p II. In the socio-political sphere the tactics are: a) persistent attempts to narrow or emasculate bourgeois-democratic liberties; b) extension of state-monopoly measures in antilabour policies (interference in bargaining between unions and employers, curtailing the right to strike, etc.).

p The evolution of imperialism’s class tactics has certainly not been straight. But since it is determined by the laws of world social development, the new tactics of the bourgeoisie do more than reflect the peculiarities of the moment; they also express the historical trend which has been growing in pace with the world revolutionary process.

p Social and economic development is an important arena of competition between the two world systems; it is the main medium that engenders and intensifies the irreconcilable class antagonism and class struggle within bourgeois society. Hence, the present sharp break with the traditional tactics of class politics on the part of monopoly capital.

p In the second half of the twentieth century, no far-sighted capitalist leader has laboured under any delusion about the difficulties encountered in building socialism and communism being anything but transient. They have increasingly appreciated the results and immediate prospects of peaceful economic competition; and they have desperately tried to discover effective means to offset the revolutionising impact of the socialist example.

p In the mainstream of bourgeois general policy, its social policy is fast becoming all important; it is by means of this policy that imperialism hopes to attain internal political stability of bourgeois society and eventually to give capitalism itself a new lease of life. As capitalism’s general crisis worsens, the bourgeoisie and the social reformists widely use tactical social manoeuvres as a means of winning over, through material concessions, hand-outs and social demagogy, a large and sometimes (for a short time) majority section of the workers, so as politically to neutralise them and weaken their leading role in the general world revolutionary movement.

p The new tactics of bourgeois struggle against the working class are a result of the attempts to weaken the class struggle so as to stave off the proletarian revolution.

p Marxism-Leninism sees bourgeois social policy as a form of class struggle by the monopoly capitalists against the world 144 revolutionary movement; it is a means for preserving and strengthening the political and economic foundations of the capitalist system; it is a form for adjusting capitalist exploitation to cope with the new situation.

p Present-day social policy of the bourgeoisie expresses an urge to seek more effective methods of weakening the class struggle at a time when the masking of class oppression and enforced concessions to the workers are becoming just as necessary for the existence of capitalism as the exploitation of hired labour by capital.

p This social policy therefore fulfils a dual function: 1) a political function aimed at weakening the class struggle in every possible way by making economic concessions and hand-outs to the workers, by social demagogy and by carefully masking the relations of class exploitation; and 2) an economic function, designed to increase to the maximum the exploitation of wage labour by seeking and using new forms and methods.

p These two components of bourgeois social policy variously underlie the actions of any section of the imperialist bourgeoisie, of any bourgeois government in the industrially advanced countries, from the clerical conservatives (the Adenauer and Erhard governments in West Germany) to the liberal reformists (the Labour Government in Britain and the Centre-Left Government in Italy).

p The trend in bourgeois social policy today is to use primarily state-monopoly methods. This does not, of course, mean that paternalistic private monopoly methods in pursuing social policy have lost all significance. But the shift in method is due to the growth of monopoly capitalism into statemonopoly capitalism and the unprecedented role of the bourgeois state in economic and social affairs. Through its policies on prices and taxes, budget allocations and social legislation and also through implementation of its social policy at factory level in the state sector of the economy, the bourgeois state has been stepping up exploitation, together with the necessary tactical measures for the “economic satisfaction" of the workers and loud social demagogy.

p In the latter half of this century the leaders of the imperialist powers have proclaimed as the prime aim of their domestic policy the establishment of the “Grand society" (President Johnson), the universal “affluent society" and the 145 “complete society" (Chancellor Erhard); these declared aims represent the persistent intention of capitalist ruling circles to work out a range of measures for the social “pacification” of the working people. With the aid of the bourgeois state and, in the last ten years, through inter-state organisations like the Common Market, the financial oligarchy has been able to produce a more far-sighted social policy than had ever been possible for individual monopolies and employers motivated by sheer economic and competitive ideas and viewing social policy through the prism of their own business.

p >

p The self-interest of capital, in the narrow utilitarian sense of the word, frequently results in a clash with the tactical aims of the class-based social policy of the bourgeois state. That is why one regularly hears strident criticism from bourgeois strategists of businessmen whose activity is governed, as Engels so succinctly put it, by the sole aim of filling “its purse à tout prix".  [145•1 

p The social policy, embodied in the bourgeois-reformist doctrine of the “affluent society”, is conspicuous for the principal sectors of its activity: 1) distribution and redistribution of the national income—“the incomes revolution”; 2) property relations—the “diffusion” of property in the means of production; 3) the socio-psychological relations between wage labour and capital—the “humanisation of labour”, “social partnership”, etc.

p Bourgeois social policy is most active in distributing and redistributing national income, including items like wages and prices, various social payments by the monopolies and the state to the workers, and the government’s fiscal policy. Most bourgeois-reformist sociologists regard this sphere as decisive. Many believe social policy is designed to overcome the flaws of national income distribution.

p There is good reason why the imperialist bourgeoisie emphasise this aspect of social policy as the main one. They are fully obliged to consider that distribution includes the most obvious elements of the workers’ class condition. The dynamics of wages, the cost of living, social payments, and tax deductions directly influence the workers’ standard of living and their opportunities for reproducing their labour 146 power. The bourgeoisie has learnt that stepped-up exploitation through wage cuts arouses the greatest protest among the population and leads to desperate and long struggle. The wages policy of the monopolies and the state allows maximum flexibility in following a zigzag course in economic and political activity. The willingness to cede ground during wage negotiations, particularly at politically tense moments, is due to the monopolies’ desire to avoid mass strikes. As soon as economic circumstances compel them, and as soon as the political situation to any degree allows, their wage policy invariably loses its elasticity and reverts to or is supplemented by traditional coercive methods.

p Behind the common facade of average wage movements lies a differentiated and extremely flexible system of remuneration of wage labour, which is utilised by bourgeois social policy. The wages of a skilled worker at a large plant are nearly 30-40 per cent higher than those of a similarly qualified worker at a small factory. Even more striking are the wage differentials of diagonally compared skill levels. The wages of an unskilled labourer at a big monopolistic plant are higher than those of a trained worker at a mediumsized factory and higher still than the wages of a skilled worker at the smallest factory.

p The wage structure in various branches of the economy is heavily exploited by bourgeois social policy. A great unevenness in wage levels of equally skilled workers prevails in various branches of industrial production in the developed capitalist countries. Employees of the chemical, atomic, electronics and printing industries stand at the top of the wage pyramid. At the bottom are workers in the light industry—textiles, food, garments, leatherwear, etc. Wage differentials between these two groups are often as great as 25-30 per cent in the U.S.A., Britain and France.

p The existing structure of workers’ overall earnings plays an exceptionally important part in bourgeois social machinations. The proportion of supplementary earnings is steadily on the increase, consisting of all manner of direct and indirect payments to the workers in the following forms: 1) lump sum cash payments (Christmas boxes, wedding, birth and confirmation gifts, payment of the family’s funeral expenses, presentations on workers’ wedding and long-service anniversaries, etc.); 2) regular monetary payments (industrial 147 pensions, supplementary holiday payments, allowances for house purchase payments, etc.); 3) contributions to the works’ social fund (cost of nursery schools, creches, rest homes, clinics, sports facilities, factory canteens, social clubs, etc.).

p During the 1950s the system of “worker participation in profits" was expanded in West Germany, France, Britain and the U.S.A. The proportion of these concessions and sops in the total wages bill amounted, 1959 polls showed, to 26 per cent in France, 30 per cent in Italy and 32 per cent in West Germany.  [147•1  It is indicative that at the big monopolistic plants and in the leading industrial sectors (chemicals, engineering, electrical engineering) the proportion was substantially greater than at the small enterprises and in the old sectors (textiles, food, etc.).

p A large part of these payments were made on a voluntary, paternalistic basis, i.e., they were not written into collective agreements or statutory acts. This was a strong curb on the influence exerted by the working-class movement on the dynamics of nominal wages.

p The dimensions of “voluntary” social payments are directly dependent on the size of the enterprise. Industrial pensions, bonuses and other types of benefits at monopolistic plants are much higher than at medium or small factories, most of which rarely have any such payments at all. This situation is widely exploited by bourgeois propaganda for popularising the social advantages of large-scale monopoly capital.

p These voluntary payments are not made by the bourgeoisie indiscriminately, the main point being to single out the most “industrially disciplined" and “politically reliable" blue- and white-collar workers.

p The size of these “voluntary” payments (industrial pensions, etc.) depends on the worker’s length of service and his “interest in his work”. At the Krupp concerns, an average wage of DM400 for every year worked secures DMl 40 pfennigs put aside for a monthly pension, a wage of DM600 brings DM240 pfennigs put aside, and DM1,000, DM4.  [147•2  This graduated industrial pension scale clearly shows the social intent of this form of paternalistic activity—it primarily rewards the skilled and highly skilled workers who stay at 148 the same factory for many years. If a worker leaves the firm or is sacked he loses all his accumulated benefits.

p Any close study of the tactics of making wage and social payment concessions to the working class shows that the traditional policy of singling out the economically privileged upper crust of workers is increasingly being replaced by concessions to a relatively large section of workers concentrated at large factories in economic sectors that are of a nationaleconomic and strategic importance.

p The growing complexity of forms of exploitation and the social manipulations of the monopoly bourgeoisie cause some changes in working conditions. What the capitalist used to regard as an extravagant waste in the lifetime of Marx and Engels, and even only a quarter of a century ago, has now become a matter of vital necessity at a time when the world revolutionary movement is progressing so triumphantly. In our day capitalism desperately tries to master the art of social mimicry designed to cover up the exploiting nature of bourgeois society. The demagogic “humanising labour" slogan serves the bourgeoisie not simply as a means of raising labour productivity at the cost of a greatly increased physical and nerve work load; it is also a means of mitigating the effects of the complete alienation of the proletariat in capitalist production, a means of embellishing the deprived state of the workers. At the large monopolistic factories all the ploys of technological aesthetics are set in motion—from pleasing designs of workshop machinery to music-while-you-work and colourful decoration of workshops, as if to nurture a spirit of enterprise and satisfaction while the workers toil.

p It should be stressed that the vast range of social policies mainly involves the large enterprises in the industrially advanced capitalist countries. The mass of small and medium enterprises continue to preserve antiquated methods of capitalist exploitation typified by poor working conditions and violations of elementary safety and health standards.

p Working conditions in the less developed countries of the capitalist world are even worse. Most of the factories, mines and building sites of the capitalist states of Latin America, Africa and Asia extensively exploit child and female labour and use blatantly barbaric methods of capitalist production; they fully qualify for Marx’s description of capitalist enterprise: “the absence of all provisions to render 149 the production process human, agreeable, or at least bearable."  [149•1 

p Property relations are becoming an ever more active sphere of bourgeois social policy. The further monopoly capitalism develops into state-monopoly capitalism, the more economic control is concentrated in the hands of a numerically small group of financiers. The growing economic domination of the monopoly bourgeoisie, based on private capitalist principles of ownership of the means of production, reveals its reactionary nature in an especially marked and extensive way and is a scandalous social anachronism as production is increasingly socialised and science and technology rapidly develop, giving rise to more and more complex social problems.

p As a consequence, the bourgeoisie is forced to elaborate more refined ways of disguising the exploiting essence of its system. It resorts to demagogy about “democratising capital" and “dispersal of property" as a result of worker “ participation" in the joint ownership of enterprises. The bourgeoisie endeavours to spread the illusion among the workers that property is owned jointly by the workers and employers. West Germany even has an act encouraging workers’ ownership. In 1967, the French Government issued an ordinance on a material interest for workers in the economic prosperity of the firm. There are experiments with spreading shares among workers and giving them an opportunity to acquire investment certificates. Other acts give tax incentives to workers’ private savings. All these multifarious forms of material enrichment are, naturally, designed to camouflage the antagonistic character of property relations.

p Marxist social writers sometimes say that the workers have seen through the designs of the monopolies and have spurned this type of blandishment. Unfortunately, this has not been quite so. One cannot eschew the fact that in the U.S.A. and West Germany, among other countries, there are many millions of small shareholders, a large part of whom are workers. In the past decade their number has increased severalfold in the U.S.A. and West Germany. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company and the Vereinigte Elektrizitats und Bergwerks-AG each have more than two million shareholders, says Business Week (1.2.1964). The 150 illusion of “popular” capitalism has undoubtedly taken in a section of the working class.

p Progressive forces in the West explain to the workers the real purpose of this form of “popular” capitalism. But there is an urgent need to put forward new slogans and demands to turn this bourgeois fraud into a means of undermining the domination of monopoly capital. This might be facilitated, for instance, by a carefully elaborated list of workers’ demands for a radical overhaul of shareholding rights; the co-option, with full rights, of workers’ representatives on supervisory councils and management bodies; transformation of the general shareholders’ meeting, where small shareholders at present simply do not count, into a body controlling the economic activity of the firm; limiting each shareholder to only one vote; giving the worker priority option on shares, and so on.

p It is not a question of rehabilitating the petty-bourgeois ideas of Proudhon concerning the proletariat buying out the capitalist enterprises. These are practical steps in the antimonopoly struggle to bring the workers closer to the levers of economic power and to create vital prerequisites for a revolutionary transformation of production relations as the working-class movement gains in strength.

p The tactics advocated by the Communist Parties on worker participation in management is one example of the creative approach to the use of piecemeal measures in social policy as it affects property. Clearly, the monopoly bourgeoisie and its reformist agents regard this system as a means of class collaboration, reinforcing in the workers ideas of a labourcapital partnership. Meanwhile, the co-option of representatives of workers’ organisations on supervisory councils and management bodies can acquire quite a different significance if the workers on these bodies resolutely defend the vital interests of the workers rather than act in a conciliatory way. It is noteworthy that many Communist Parties, particularly those in Italy, France, Belgium and West Germany, regard worker participation in running industry as a major means of curtailing the monopolies’ power.

p The class nature of the motive forces of social policy is complex and contradictory. The tactics of material concessions to the workers have been clearly forced on the bourgeoisie by the workers and their world allies, and lead to a reform 151 which Lenin once described as a “by-product of the revolutionary class struggle”.  [151•1 

p But it is just as clear that the changes in social tactics caused by the progress of the world revolutionary process themselves exert an influence on the course of the class struggle. From this point of view, the social policy of the bourgeoisie is a preventive tactical manoeuvre aimed at politically neutralising the workers and weakening their revolutionary potential. But neither the tactics nor the enforced concessions can halt the process of revolutionising the masses of people.

p In the course of the class struggle workers of the capitalist countries strive to exploit the favourable opportunities that have arisen as a result of the consolidation of the forces of world socialism. It is just as important today to bear in mind Lenin’s advice: “It would be absolutely wrong to believe that immediate struggle for socialist revolution implies that we can, or should, abandon the fight for reforms."  [151•2 

p Communist and Workers’ Parties, and trade unions carrrying on the class struggle, have the chance to wrest from the bourgeoisie the initiative in socio-economic policy. They can counterpose the bourgeois tactics, designed to strengthen the domination of capital, with their own militant tactics of struggle to turn these reforms into structural reforms undermining the domination of the imperialist bourgeoisie and fortifying the positions of the workers in their fight for socialism.

p It is only possible to fill these socio-economic reforms with revolutionary content if the workers play an active and politically conscious part in fighting for the implementation of their demands and bringing the results of bourgeois tactical concessions under firm control, securing them and constantly extending their programme of demands. In this situation, it is essential to combine the socio-economic and political struggle, the struggle for extensive and all-embracing democratisation of the political system.

p Outwardly identical socio-economic reforms may express different political trends. At a time of rapid upsurge in the class struggle that forces the bourgeoisie onto the defensive, 152 socio-economic reforms are an integral part of the struggle for socialist revolution (as was shown by the social gains of the working class in a number of countries between 1945 and 1947). These reforms have quite a different political content when there is a temporary lull in the class struggle. Then, the willingness of the bourgeois to make concessions in wage negotiations and extend social legislation may well improve certain aspects of the workers’ material conditions, but—and this is the main thing—they are a means of distracting the workers from urgent tasks of political struggle and help in spreading dangerous bourgeois-reformist illusions about the possibility of radical changes occurring in the workers’ condition within the framework of the existing economic order.

p It is all the more important in these circumstances to define the character and impact of bourgeois policy on the workers’ class consciousness and on their class struggle.

p Against the general background of growing world socialism and declining world capitalism, those areas of the world where the imperialist bourgeoisie manage to influence the ideology and policy of some sections of the working-class movement stand out. These are economic and political centres of world imperialism—the industrially advanced capitalist countries. There the very course of capitalist development has created all the necessary material and technological conditions for transforming society into socialism. But it is just there that the working-class movement faces great difficulties.

p Communist and Workers’ Parties do not regard the prospects for developing the class struggle as being bound up with the absolute impoverishment of the working class, but they always bear in mind that bourgeois material concessions to the workers in boom periods breed petty-bourgeois, reformist illusions among the least class-conscious working people.

p The monopoly bourgeoisie wields all manner of social policies to exert an influence on the class struggle and to hamper and weaken the revolutionary movement of the working people in some countries. All the same, socio-economic policy has enabled the imperialists only partially to achieve their class ajms. It has prevented the working-class movement in the West from taking the step towards the abolition of the capitalist system, yet it has been powerless to check the class struggle in the centres of world imperialism.

p The utter historical hopelessness of bourgeois social policy 153 is becoming increasingly obvious. The relatively high wages and rise in social allowances in a number of capitalist countries do not in themselves any longer guarantee that the working class will remain passive. The range of workers’ class demands is becoming wider and the interconnection between the workers’ day-to-day socio-economic interests and the economic and political rights usurped by capital has been growing ever more complex. Moreover, the opportunities for social manoeuvring over wages and social legislation are not limitless either. During economic recessions and fierce competitive struggles, there is much less room for manoeuvre and this inevitably exacerbates class conflicts.

The working-class movement in the capitalist countries is conducting big class battles against the monopolies and has made enough headway for a fresh assault on the system of exploitation. By improving the tactical fundamentals of their policies, the Communist and Workers’ Parties are endeavouring to clear from the path of the class struggle all obstacles that prevent the workers from advancing to socialism and to find more effective means of counteracting bourgeois social policy.