24 THE CLASS STRUGGLE SOCIALIST POLICY IN PEACE AND WAR 25 of the workers wirich is their only hope of emancipation. The workers cannot, therefore, make commor cause with their own capitalists in any such industrial struggle, and must not participate in the same.
So much for the class struggle point of view in so far as it is shared by Socialists and anarchists. But here a cleavage ensues.
The anarchists, in diverging from the Socialists, proceed to elaborate the class struggle theory as follows: The present social system, say they, is based on class divisions, with the working class as the subject class. The present state is merely the political expression of our industrial force of organization, with the capitalist class as the industrial master.
The state is in fact an instrument of the industrial mastery of the capitalist class. Present day political struggles cannot, therefore, be anything but a struggle between different groups of capitalists for the division of the spoils of their common exploitation of the working class. And the working class cannot possibly have any interest whatever in these struggles. The capitalist world is not our world, and we do not care what becomes of it. It cannot become any better while it remains capitalist; nor can it become any worse. We are therefore utterly indifferent as to what transpires therein.
The only interest we take in it is our unceasing effort to destroy it root and branch.
The anarchist comes therefore to the same practical policy as the pure and simple trade unionist that of no politics.
Theoretically, at least, there is, however, a vast difference between the two: The pure and simple trade unionist wants no independent, inter industrial, class line political action, so that the workers may be free to divide along industrial or other lines and make common cause on the political field with their employers along such non class lines of division. While the anarchist does not want the working class to participate in the political game at all. Believing all politics to be a capitalist game, he does not want the workers to sit in at it, even to the extent of playing an independent hand.
The Socialist looks upon society from a somewhat different angle than the anarchist, and his conception of the class struggle is therefore a much wider one. The class struggle is not merely a fight between present day classes for the division of the social product. Not yet merely a struggle for the mastery of society. It is all that and vastly more besides.
It is an engine of social progress the world being continually transformed by and through the struggle, so that each rising class in defeating its predecessor does not merely succeed to the mastery of the world, but to the mastery of a different and better world from that which its predecessor predecessor left behind. Each succeeding class makes its contribution not only to the transformation but also to the improvement of the world. And, what more important, each succeeding class improves the world while fighting for its mastery, and not only when it has won the fight and succeeded to the control of the social system. The struggle is, therefore, a very complicated one, and not one of mere brute force merely. Nor yet is it a purely mechanical one, in which certain economic factors work automatically and with fatal precision.
As a result of this view of the meaning and function of the class struggle, the Socialist arrives at a policy which differs from both, the trade union policy and the anarchist policy.
It differs from the trade union policy in that it stands squarely on the class interest point of view, which excludes the possibility of the workers going hand in hand with the capitalists of any group at any time, either for industrial or other reasons. Believing, as the Socialist does, that class divisions are fundamental in society, there cannot to his way of thinking be any possible common interest between any group of workers and any group of capitalists which should transcend the common interests of all the workers, and therefore permit the division of the workers into hostile camps.
But he does not share, on the other hand, the anarchist indifference to the world in which the workers live and work.
The Socialist believes that the present social system may be