An Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

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Monographs in Politics

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Monographs in Politics

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Editor J W Grove

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This new paperback series is intended for the university lecturer in politics and administration, the teacher of similar subjects (or of general studies) in colleges of further education, and for undergraduate or postgraduate students. Further monographs planned or in preparation include works on political theory, political institutions, elections and voting behaviour, party organisation, the social background to politics, local government, public administration and international politics.

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An Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels J B Sanderson

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OAKESHOTT'S PHILOSOPHICAL POLITICS

W H Greenleaf

PRIVATE INTERESTS AND PUBLIC POLICY The Experience of the French Economic and Social Council

J E S Hayward SCOTTISH POL1I'1CAL BEHAVIOUR A Case Study in British Homogeneity Ian Budge & D W Urwin THE RESPONSIBLE SOCIETY

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The Ideas of the English Guild Socialists

S T Glass PARTY POLITICS IN ENGLISH LOCAL GOVERNMENT J G Bulpitt ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS W F Mandle THE MIND OF JEREMY BENTHAM D J Manning LAND FTYCTIONS IN THE GERMAN FEDER UBLIC R J C Preece ADMINISTRATIVE JUSTICE H J Elcock AN INTERPRETATION OF THE POLITICAL IDEAS OF MARX AND ENGELS J B Sanderson

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An Interpretation of the political Ideas of ,Marx and Engels IG,

JOHN SANDERSON Lecturer in Politics, University of Strathclyde

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L O N G M A N S, G REEN A N D CO L T D London and Harlow Associated companies, branches and representatives throughout the world © Longmans, Green and Company L t d 1969 F irst published 1969 P rinted in Great B ritain by B utler & Tanner L t d , Frome and London

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Substantial portions of the typescript of this volume have been read by Professor Allen Potter of the University of Essex and Mr Donald Gordon of Strathclyde University. Mr Edwin Gibb of Strathclyde also read the typescript of Chapter 3. I am grateful to these gentlemen for their advice and assistance. The account of Marxism here presented also owes not a little to conversations which I had several years ago with Dr Robert E. Dowse, now of Exeter University. I am grateful also to Professor J. W. Grove, the editor of this series of monographs, for his help and guidance. The text is, of course, entirely mine. Parts of Chapter 4 are substantially reproduced from an article entitled `Marx and Engels on the state' which appeared in the TVestern Political Quarterly, xvi, no. 4 (December 1963). I am grateful to the Editor for his permission to reprint them here. Strathclyde University, July 1968

vii

ABBREVIATIONS

Unless otherwise indicated, all the works referred to in this book were published by Martin Lawrence or Lawrence and Wishart. The following abbreviations of titles of works by Marx and Engels will be used in the footnotes (dates of publication in parenthesis): GI

Sw HF Sc PP R OR

RM EPM

German Ideology (1965). Selected Morks, 2 VOls (1953)• Holy Family (1956). Selected Correspondence (1956). Poverty of Philosophy (1959). The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (ed. D. Ryazanoff) (1930). On Religion (1958). The Russian Menace to Europe (ed. P. W. Blackstock and B. F. Hoselitz) (Allen & Unwin, 1953)• Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of z844 (1959).

ONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

xi

I MARX AND ENGELS: REVOLUTIONARIES AND MEN OF LETTERS

The Young Marx Engels, 1848, and Exile in London II THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY III MARX'S MODEL OF CAPITALISM IV

THE MARXIAN THEORY OF THE STATE

I II

15 44 55

VI FUTURE SOCIETY

75 98

CONCLUSION

IIO

APPENDIX: MARX'S VERDICT' ON RUSSIA

115

INDEX

I17

V PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION

I NTRODUCTION

This monograph on Marx and Engels purports to give an historian's account of their political thought. Though in the body of the work I will use the word `history' in the usual ways (to indicate either the past or a study of the past), the historian, as I understand his activity, has a distinctive manner of approaching the past. Unlike the practical man, he is concerned with a past that is dead; not, that is to say, with a past that is alive in the sense of yielding to the investigator conclusions or maxims which are relevant to current predicaments. The historian is concerned solely with the reconstruction of the past by means of the evidence presently available to him, and his past has no particular connection with the present, although in order to make the former intelligible he must assume a certain minimal similarity between past and present. If these premises are granted, it will be clear that from the point of view of the historian the great majority of the existing studies of Marx and Engels are imperfectly historical, for the existence of communist régimes and communist parties claiming Marx and Engels as their intellectual precursors has made it wellnigh impossible for communists and non-communists alike to take a dispassionate view of the pair,' and discussion of their works has primarily been in the `idiom' of practice,2 being concerned for the most part with such practical questions as whether Marx's analysis of capitalism is or is not mistaken, or whether his system of ideas is to be esteemed pernicious or otherwise. Thus even in such a scholarly work as Dr Tucker's Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx3 this idiom is clearly discernible. Capital, we learn from Dr Tucker, is to be regarded as `an intellectual museum piece', 1 For an account of the relatively disinterested British assessments of Marx's contribution to historical and economic studies made before the appearance of what was understood to be the menace of communism, see E. J. Hobsbawm, `Dr Marx and his Victorian critics' (New Reasoner, 1, Summer, 1957). 2 For an account of the respective `idioms' of practice and history, see Michael Oakeshott, `The activity of being an historian', reprinted in his collection of essays Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Methuen, 1962). 3 Cambridge University Press (1961). Xi

xii

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

less relevant to today than a short paper on aesthetics written by Marx in 1844. Nevertheless, Tucker is at pains to demonstrate the shortcomings of Marxism (an `aberration of the human mind') because it is potentially—and in communist countries has actually become—subversive of human freedom. My account of them will not, I hope, reveal any disposition to regard our authors either as omniscient beings or as the twisted progenitors of vile political establishments, for such dispositions should be alien to the historian. Thus I hope to treat Marx and Engels in the same way that one might treat, say, Auguste Comte or John Stuart Mill. Studies of Marxism are, of course, legion. But as well as being practical in orientation, most of them seem to have been preoccupied with what might be described as the `sociology' of Marx and Engels, or with their economic theory. The following study concentrates upon a reconstruction of their specifically political thought which it will endeavour to locate within the context of their more general sociological, economic and philosophical doctrines. In the present advanced state of scholarship in the field of Marx studies, I have taken it as absolutely necessary to quote frequently, and sometimes at considerable length, from the works of Marx and Engels. This may not make the book easier to read, but I think that today such quotation is to be regarded as an inevitable feature of serious works on the Marxian system. Some of the passages that I quote are exceedingly well known, and although I have not gone out of my way to include them, at the same time I have not felt myself debarred from their use merely on account of their familiarity. For the most part, I have quoted from readily available editions of the works concerned. While concentrating on Marx, I have treated Marx and Engels, in the period of their association between 1844 and Marx's death in 1883, as the authors of a single system of ideas. I have clearly indicated the date of Engels's post-1883 works to which I refer, and I present this illustrative material for what it is worth. Engels's views do not seem, either during Marx's life or after, to have exactly coincided with those of Marx, but I think that in the forty-year period in question they are sufficiently similar to allow of the treatment as a unified whole here attempted. In expounding the Marxian system I have made no reference to Engels's early essays and his book on The Condition of the Working Class in England in z844, which I take to be `pre-Marxian' works. An

Introduction

xiii

terpretation of the Politicalldeas of Marx and Engels is intended as an In introductory account, and perhaps it will not be wholly without value if it provokes an inclination to turn from the commentary to the text.

MARX AND ENGELS: REVOLUTIONARIES AND MEN OF LETTERS

THE YOUNG MARX

By the graveside of Marx, Frederick Engels gave a convincing summary of the former's life and intentions: His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society ... to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival ... And, consequently, Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time ... he died ... mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers—from the mines of Siberia to California .. his name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.' The subject of this oration was born at Trier in Prussia in 1818 and was baptized a Protestant after his Jewish father, an eminent local lawyer, had found it prudent to become a Christian in trans. 1824. From 1835 to 1841 the young Marx pursued university studies at Bonn and Berlin, writing romantic poetry which he soon came to regard as puerile, and taking his doctorate in philosophy in the latter year at the University of Jena. Like most young Germans of his generation who had intellectual pretensions, Marx fell to some extent under the omnipresent influence of Hegel, and Marx is said to have read day and night in order to master the formidable philosopher's system, though he seems never to have wholly succumbed to it. While being impressed by many parts of this system (as we shall see) Marx rejected Hegel's conservatism, and became one of the so-called `Young Hegelians'. Now the Young Hegelians, while adhering substantially to what might be called the German philosophical tradition, were radicals in that they rejected as irrational various elements in the 1 SIF 14 p. 154.

2

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

current social and political structure of Germany. Indeed, `criticism' was their motto. Religious belief was the particular object of their hostility, and before he took his doctorate Marx had planned, together with his (at this time) close friend Bruno Bauer, to establish a journal which would be called The ,4rchive of ~4theisrn.1 But the scheme collapsed when Bauer, advertising his unbelief too openly, failed to get a professorship in Theology at the University of Bonn, a failure which effectively crushed Marx's own hopes of entering academic life. Thus it was as a radical opponent of the status quo that Marx became associated with the Rheinische Zeitung, a newly founded opposition newspaper. Marx was appointed editor in October 1842 but some months later the paper was suppressed, apparently at the instigation of Czar Nicholas I, acting in his capacity as guarantor of European legitimacy. At this stage, then, Marx was a radical revolutionary who anticipated the appearance of a cataclysm which would shatter the existing order of things in Europe. But he had not yet arrived at the doctrine of historical materialism, the doctrine for which he is probably most famous; nor was there as yet in his writings anything specifically indicating the proletariat as the revolutionary agency. However, in 1843, his interest having been aroused by articles in the Rheinische Zeitung dealing with economics and advocating socialism, Marx moved to Paris, at that time the main centre of proletarian and revolutionary activity in Europe, where he embarked upon a study of these matters.2 Previously, while rejecting Hegelian conservatism, he had at the same time rejected socialism also, and it appears that his appointment as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung was intended by the paper's proprietors to have had the effect of preventing any further socialistic material finding its way into the paper's columns. At the same time Marx confessed that his limited knowledge of the relevant subjects put him in a poor position to make any final judgments. Thus his studies in Paris were in this context to be decisive. Hitherto in Marx's career it seems almost certain that the only proletarians with whom he was 1 See

Leopold Schwarzschild, The Red Prussian (Hamish Hamilton, 1948), P. 50. This fruitful sojourn in Paris was ended at the beginning of 1845 by an expulsion order from the Guizot government, acting under pressure from the Prussian government which took exception to hostile articles appearing in a journal with which Marx was connected. Marx proceeded to Brussels. Here he made contact with the London-based Communist League, and it was for this organization that he wrote the Communist Manifesto. 2

árx and Engels: Revolutionaries and Men of Letters

3

acquainted were those he read about in books. He consulted the works of the French socialists (which had inspired the socialist contributions to the Rheinische Zeitung), but also seems to have been influenced (as were indeed not a few of his German contemporaries) by a book published in 1842 written by Lorenz von Stein, a conservative Hegelian and strong supporter of monarchical institutions in Prussia. Two years earlier, von Stein had been commissioned by the Government of Prussia to go to Paris and make a firsthand report on the dangerous left-wing doctrines said to be rampant there. Now von Stein gave a full account of these ideas, and also of the proletariat, the class which, it was sometimes held, would bring them to fruition by their joint action. He wrote that this class `may very properly be called a dangerous element, dangerous in respect of its numbers and its often tested courage; dangerous in respect of its consciousness of unity; dangerous in respect of its feeling that only through revolution can its aims be reached, its plans accomplished'.' And it was apparently from passages such as this that Marx drew much of the inspiration for his idea of the proletariat as history-making force, so that in his important early essay on the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, written in 1843, Marx is still to be found calling in Young Hegelian fashion for criticism, but also adding that the weapon of criticism must be supplemented by the criticism of weapons, and declaring that `as philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people the emancipation of the Germans into men will be accomplished.'2 Another German writer who was to influence Marx and who had also, like von Stein, been to Paris and there come into contact with left-wing ideas was Moses Hess. Now at this stage in his career Hess was what Marx and Engels were later to call a `True Socialist': that is to say, he believed in socialism not so much because he saw its appearance as historically inevitable, but because he regarded it as morally obligatory, a spiritual necessity, and hoped that it would be recognized as such by the rich and powerful, against whom, therefore, he contemplated no violence. Thus he assured his readers that `no social class 'Quoted

by Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, p. 115.

2 OR, p. 57•

3

By 1847 he had temporarily adopted Marxian beliefs. ME-E

4

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

would be so heartless as to leave its fellow men in misery if it had the means of making them all happy. We see daily that it is precisely among the moneyed classes that the attempts basically to improve our social conditions find the deepest approval and the liveliest sympathy, beyond a doubt because they are the best educated.'-' Holding these views, Hess was led to repudiate vigorously Lorenz von Stein's suggestions that communism was a specifically working-class phenomenon and that it was a theory based upon materialistic selfishness. `It is an error', Hess declared, `diligently spread by reaction, and by Stein above all, that socialism develops only among the proletariat, and among the proletariat only as a question of fulfilling the needs of the stomach.'' Hess had visited Paris in 1832 and had there encountered extreme left-wing speculation. The outcome was that Hess became perhaps the earliest German socialist, and in his book The Sacred History of Mankind, published in 1837, he evinced his opposition to exploitation, to the division of labour, and to the institution of private property itself. Hess was not an original thinker; rather he was an enthusiastic `middleman' of ideas, and he has the distinction of being partly responsible for the conversion of both Marx and Engels—though separately—to communist beliefs. In Paris in August 1844 Marx encountered for the second time Frederick Engels, whose work on The Condition of the (Forking Class in England in z844 was soon to be recognized in left-wing circles as an authoritative account. Although at their first meeting some two years previously Marx had found Engels unimpressive, he now read with appreciation articles written by Engels in the Deutsch-Fran~osische Jahrbucher, a shortlived journal of which Marx was one of the editors, on economic and political affairs in England. They now began a partnership that was both practical and intellectual and which was to endure until Marx's death in 1883. Their first task was the working out of the doctrine of historical materialism, a bald statement of which was to appear four years later in the Communist Manifesto. Much intellectual attention has been attracted in recent years to the earlier, more explicitly ethical, thought of Marx. Writers like Dr Tucker, in his book Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, have gone so far as to maintain that the mature Marxian system is to be understood 1 Quoted by Schwarzschild, op. cit., pp. 83-4. 'Quoted by S. Hook, From Hegel to Marx (Ann Arbor, 1962), p. 199.

Njarx and Engels: Revolutionaries and Men of Letters

5

in terms of Marx's youthful compositions, especially in terms of his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of z 844. Now the early Marx was essentially an ethical writer, a writer who subjected his society to savage criticism because of its characteristic inhumanity; and his key concept was that of `alienation', a term which Hegel had used extensively and which Marx had also found in the works of Ludwig Feurbach, particularly in his Essence of Christianity, published in 1841. Feuerbach was a prominent Young Hegelian, and like Marx and the others he was intimately acquainted with the philosophical system of Hegel, wherein the view-is_sustained _that_the_natural and historical- worlds are to be regarded as God's alienated self which seeks to end this alienated existence by being reunited with God in total consciousness. In Féuerbäch's -hands -the concept of alienation ceases to be philosophical and becomes psychological, and as such is employed by Feuerbach in his critique of Christianity. The Young Hegelians, we have already observed, had as their immediate aim the destruction of religious faith: thus David Strauss subjected the scriptures to the sort of critical scrutiny currently being received by other historical documents, and the results were alarming indeed to the faithful. In a sense, however, Feuerbach's critique was the more subversive, for he held that God was to be understood as a projection of the human mind, a projection occasioned in part by the spiritual poverty of the life of men, for `the more empty life is, the fuller, the more concrete is God. The impoverishment of the real world and the enriching of God is one act. Only the poor man has a rich God. God springs out of the feeling of a want; what man is in need of... that is God. Thus the disconsolate feeling of a void, of loneliness, needed a God in whom there is society, a union of beings fervently loving each other.'-' Feuerbach was thus led to write that `God is nothing other than the prototype and ideal of man: as God is, so man should be and desires to be, or at least hopes to become sometime'.' Here we observe that instead of saying with Hegel that man is God in his self-alienation, Feuerbach argued that we must reverse this proposition and assert that God is man in his self-alienation. `Man's knowledge of God', he wrote, `is man's knowledge of himself, of his own nature.... Where the consciousness of God is, there is the being of God—in man, therefore; in the being of God it is only thy -' Essence of Christianity (Harper & Row, 1957) P• 73. ' Kleine Philosophische Schriften, quoted by Tucker, op. cit., p. 89.

6

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

own being which is an object to thee, and what presents itself before thy consciousness is simply what lies behind it." Following from this analysis of religious belief, Feuerbach's conclusion in the Essence of Christianity was that `the antithesis of divine and human is altogether illusory, that it is nothing else than the antithesis between the human nature in general and the human individual; that ... the object and contents of Christian religion are altogether human'? He goes on to explain that `the divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective—i.e. contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of human nature.13 `Know thyself' (the original title of his Essence of Christianity), then, was Feuerbach's injunction to mankind; and if followed this injunction would soon result in the unmasking of Christianity (and other religions) and in the revelation of their true nature. He did not undertake to abolish religion, or to make it appear wholly absurd, but rather to extract from it its wholesome content (i.e. a humanist ethic) and thus `bring to light the treasure hid in man' .4 In this manner a new philosophy would be forthcoming, and `this philosophy has for its principle, not the Substance of Spinoza, not the ego of Kant and Fichte, not the Absolute Identity of Schelling, not the Absolute Mind of Hegel, in short, no abstract, merely conceptual being, but a real being, the true Ens realissimum—man; its principle, therefore, is in the highest degree positive and real'.5 It is well known, of course, that in his own analysis of religious belief, Marx took his lead from the Feuerbachian position: but what has not been so frequently observed, as Dr Tucker points out, is that it was clearly Feuerbach who originally turned Hegel `the right way up', and that in this crucial respect, Marx was his follower. Feuerbach was `in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy' .6 Feuerbach was an atheist (although by adopting an unusual definition of `atheism' in terms of egotism he was able to deny this designaof Christianity, p. 230. 2 Ibid., pp. 13-14• 3 Ibid., p. 14, emphasis added. 4 Ibid., p. xlii. 5 Ibid., p. xxxv, emphasis in original. 6 EPM, p. 14$. Cf. STS, 11, p. 333 for Engels's account of the impact of the 1 Essence

Essence of Christianity.

Njarx and Engels: Revolutionaries and Men of Letters

7

tion) and a humanist, and it was his belief that once men had been made aware of the intellectual error involved in religion, they would cease to concern themselves with a non-existent God, who was in reality nothing more than a projection of their own desires and feelings, and turn to one another as the true objects of human interest and devotion. Atheism was a condition of Feuerbachian humanism. He who says no more of me than that I am an atheist, says and knows nothing of me. The question as to the existence or nonexistence of God ... belongs to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but not to the nineteenth. I deny God. But that means for me that I deny the negation of man. In place of the illusory, fantastic, heavenly position of man, which in actual life necessarily leads to the degradation of man, I substitute the tangible, actual, and consequently also the political and social position of mankind. The question concerning the existence or non-existence of God is for me nothing but the question concerning the existence or nonexistence of man.' Mutual love was in fact the foundation of all properly human relationships, and was regarded by Feuerbach as an agency capable of solving all man's problems. Marx, while accepting in essence this account of religion, went much further and so broadened the notion of alienation as to encompass many other spheres of human activity. `The immediate task of philosophy', Marx asserted in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, `... once the saintly form of human self-alienation has been unmasked, is to unmask self-alienation in its unholy forms. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of right and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.'2 That the impetus for Marx's broadened conception of alienation came from Feuerbach's account of God as alienated man is indicated by the relative frequency with which he sought to make his own conception intelligible by referring to the Feuerbachian one. Thus in the first volume of Capital when Marx was describing the way in which human beings are currently treated as mere objects and subordinated 1 Preface to vol. 1 of Saemtliche Werke, quoted by G. Lichtheim Marxism: A historical and critical study (Routledge, 1961), p. 17.

2 OR, p. 42.

8

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

to the dictates of the capitalist mode of production, he asserted that matters could not be otherwise `in a mode of production in which the labourer exists to satisfy the needs of self-expansion of existing values, instead of, on the contrary, material wealth existing to satisfy the needs of development on the part of the labourer. As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand." Further, as Marx had already indicated, criticism would involve revolutionary action. Thus in the German Ideology (written in the period 1845-6) Marx and Engels wrote of Feuerbach that `he wants ... merely to produce a correct consciousness about an existing fact; whereas for the real communist it is a question of overthrowing the existing order of things'.2 In fact, Marx came rapidly to the realization that human alienation lay at the root of such evil institutions as the state, money, and private property, and that man was continually producing and reproducing what he called in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of z844 an `inhuman power',3 an alien and hostile world over against him, a world consisting, of commodities and institutions which were alleged to serve man's ends but which really had the effect of dehumanizing and oppressing him, and this was to be one of the themes of Capital. Thus, in considering the institution of the state, Marx reversed the priorities of Hegel's political philosophy: `Hegel', he declared, `proceeds from the state and turns man into subjectified state ... [but] just as religion does not create man but man religion— so the political system does not create the people but rather the people create the political system.'4 Alienation for the young Marx appeared most significantly in the economic life of society, and this belief acts as a most important link between his earlier system and what might be called `mature Marxism'. Moreover, the young Marx was led to see money as the supreme example of human alienation, and (even more significantly) to identify alienated man with the members of the propertyless proletariat. In his essay On the Jewish Question, written in the autumn of 1843, Marx claimed that `money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it.... Just as man, 1 (1961), p. Gal.

2 p• 33. 3 P. 126. Marx and Engels, Historische-Kritische Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) (trans. Tucker, op. cit., p. I04). 4

1.1,

P. 434

ivarx and Engels: Revolutionaries and Men of Letters

9

so long as he is engrossed in religion, can only objectify his essence by an alien and fantastic being; so under the sway of egotistic need, he can only affirm himself and produce objects in practice by subordinating his products and his own activity to the domination of an alien entity, namely money." Probably taking a lead from Hess's slightly earlier essay On the Essence of Money,2 Marx alleged that present society was composed substantially of Christians who had thoroughly taken over Judaism as their practical creed and whose main activity was therefore `huxtering' and whose `worldly God' was undoubtedly money. The problem, then, to which Marx addressed himself in this essay, was not so much that of how to effect the political emancipation of the Jews (which had in any case been achieved in the United States) as how to release society itself from the hold of `practical Judaism', for `in emancipating itself from huxtering and money and thus from real practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself'.3 And the emancipatory agency, the proletariat, made their first appearance in Marx's writings in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right of 1843; that is, before Marx had gained any substantial first-hand experiences of the industrial working class as such. Despite this lack of experience, Marx was convinced of the emancipatory potentialities of the proletariat: when they were gripped by the philosophy of communism,, they would overthrow current society with its wretched institutions and thus end human self-alienation. Replying in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right to the question of how emancipation could be achieved in Germany, Marx stated that he saw the solution in the formation of a class with radical chains ... an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong in general is perpetrated against it; which can invoke no historical but only its human title, which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a T. B. Bottomore, ed., Karl Marx: Early Writings (Watts, 1963), PP• 37-9• 2 This essay was submitted to Marx and Arnold Ruge for publication in their

1

journal, the Deutsche-FranZosische Jahrbucher, but due to the failure of the journal after only one issue, was subsequently published elsewhere in 18443 Early Writings, op. cit., p. 34.

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

Io

sphere, finally which cannot emancipate itself without ... thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which ... is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete rewinning of man. The dissolution of society ... is the proletariat.' It is clear therefore that Marx did not confine himself, as did Feuerbach, to the suggestion that to achieve the good life men should become aware of the nature of themselves and their world (and consequently of their intellectual errors also); rather he advocated the conscious destruction of current society by a united proletariat, the class that bore with them the interests of mankind as a whole. And this is the rationale of Marx's final thesis on Feuerbach, written in 1845: `The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.12 Now this celebrated remark was probably directed against many of the other Young Hegelians as well as against Feuerbach, for it was Marx's opinion that during the late 183os and early 1840s they had been engaged in a `philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality',3 a series of sterile and abstract philosophical debates during which, Marx reported, it had not `occurred to any one of these philosophers to enquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality' ,4 and upon which he commented ironically that `principles ousted one another, heroes of the mind overthrew each other with unheard of rapidity, and in the three years 1842-5 more of the past was swept away than normally in three centuries' .5 With Marx, therefore, a theoretical understanding of the human situation necessarily suggests a practical line of action to remedy the defects of this situation; and this unity of theory and practice, which found its most dramatic expression in the emancipating activities of the proletariat, was an element of the Marxian system to which he returned repeatedly, and he contrasted his own view with that of the Young Hegelians who conceived human bondage only in terms of intellect and consciousness. This unity of theory and practice was, for instance, insisted on by Marx in his fourth thesis on Feuerbach: Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world and I OR, Pp• 56—'7•

4 Ibid., p. 6.

2

SW II, P. 367

6 Ibid., p. 3.

3 GI, p. 2.

árx and Engels: Revolutionaries and Men of Letters

II

a real one. His work consists in the dissolution of the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the secular foundation detaches itself from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm is really only to be explained by the self-cleavage and self-contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must itself, therefore, first be understood in its contradiction and then, by the removal of the contradiction, revolutionized in practice.I And there can be little doubt that Engels was expressing Marx's own opinion when be wrote two years after the latter's death that `the historical theory of Marx is the fundamental condition of all reasoned and consistent revolutionary tactics; to discover these tactics one has only to apply the theory to the economic and political conditions of the country in question'.2 ENGELS, 1848, AND EXILE IN LONDON

Engels, who like Marx was a radical and (again like Marx) had been influenced by the communism of Moses Hess, began his partnership with Marx in July 1844. Engels was the son of a German cotton manufacturer, and while working at the Manchester branch of his father's firm, Erman & Engels, he made a study of industrialism in Britain and the outcome was his book on The Condition of the Working Class in England in z844. However, the first product of his association with Marx was a book called The Holy Family, later described by Engels as `a satirical criticism of one of the latest forms blunderingly assumed by German philosophical idealism of the time',3 and this appeared in 1845. This was followed by the German Ideology, a further critical consideration of current trends in German philosophy, which was completed in the summer of the following year, though the work as a whole was not published during the lifetime of the authors. In the German Ideology, however, can be seen the near emergence of the mature Marxian system. In 1847 Marx undertook in the Poverty of Philosophy a systematic criticism of Proudhon's social and political ideas; and finally there came in 1848 a comprehensive, if brief, statement of the Marxian position in the Communist Manifesto. Almost simultaneously with the publication 1 SVII,

p. 366.

2 SC, p. 459.

3 SVII, P. 144.

12

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

of this document, the 1848 revolution broke out in Paris, and was closely followed by risings in Germany. Marx, while seeing little prospect of a mass revolt in politically backward Germany, returned to Paris at the invitation of the Provisional Government, whose members regarded him as `a friend of freedom',' and thence to Cologne where he became editor-in-chief of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which resumed publication as an openly revolutionary journal advocating a temporary alliance between the working class and the radical sections of the bourgeoisie. The King of Prussia dissolved the German National Assembly in November 1848. Marx and Engels had had nothing but scorn for its members whose proceedings perfectly exemplified a phenomenon which they called `parliamentary cretinism'. Of this pathetic shortcoming the left-wing of the Assembly, the `elite and pride of revolutionary Germany' as Engels ironically called them, were especially guilty. These poor, weak-minded men, during the course of their generally very obscure lives, had been so little accustomed to anything like success, that they actually believed their paltry amendments ... would change the face of Europe. They had, from the beginning of their legislative career, been more imbued than any other faction of the Assembly with that incurable malady parliamentary cretinism, a disorder which penetrates its unfortunate victims with the solemn conviction that the whole world, its history and future, are governed and determined by a majority of votes in that particular representative body which has the honour to count them among its members.' Reaction having re-established itself in Prussia, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed and Marx was arrested and tried on a charge of treason. Characteristically, Marx harangued the jury on the subject of the impermanency of legal systems when viewed from the standpoint of the materialist conception of history. Here [he asserted], the code of laws which I hold in my hands has not created modern civil society. It happened just the other way. ' J. Lewis, Karl Marx: his life and teaching (.1965), p. 98.

1

Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany (1 933)) P. 92.

Marx and Engels: Revolutionaries and Men of Letters

13

The civil society that arose in the eighteenth and developed in the nineteenth century found its legal expression in the code. As soon as it ceases to correspond with the social conditions, the code will be as effete as waste paper.' Duly edified, the jury acquitted Marx and its foreman thanked him for having given such an instructive lecture. His acquittal notwithstanding Marx was forced by the authorities to leave Germany. Paris, where he thence proceeded, also proved an uncomfortable resting place, the Provisional Government having been replaced by less well-disposed persons whom Marx suspected of having designs on his life when he was ordered by the Prefect of Police to move to Morbihan, one of France's less healthy regions. Thus Marx finally made his way to London—the place of exile of so many continental revolutionaries, and not a few conservative politicians, during the nineteenth century. Though he originally intended to stay but a few weeks, London in fact remained his permanent home for the rest of his life. It was during this period that Marx spent so much of his time in the reading room of the British Museum, doing research for his best-known work, Capital, the first volume of which (the only volume to appear during the author's lifetime) appeared in 1867. For income Marx had to rely on donations from friends (especially from Engels, who eventually became a partner in Erman & Engels), small legacies left him by relatives, and journalistic work, more particularly that undertaken in his capacity as British correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune. Usually this income was far from sufficient to keep Marx and his family from gross deprivation; three of Marx's children died during the London period, and his wife was stricken with smallpox. Marx himself also suffered from indifferent health, and he announced (perhaps only half in jest) that in his writings he would make the capitalists pay for the boils which afflicted him. A Prussian spy who managed to gain access to Marx's house has left, in a report to his superiors, a striking description of the latter's plight in exile: He lives in one of the worst and cheapest neighbourhoods in London. He occupies two rooms. There is not one clean or decent piece of furniture in either room, everything is broken, tattered and ' Quoted by A. G. Meyer, Marxism (Harvard University Press, 1954), P. 8.

14

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

torn, with thick dust over everything ... manuscripts, books and newspapers lie beside the children's toys, bits and pieces from his wife's sewing basket, cups with broken rims, dirty spoons, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot, tumblers, pipes, tobacco ash—all piled up on the same table. On entering the room smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water to such an extent that at first you seem to be groping about in a cavern—until you get used to it and manage to make out certain objects in the haze.' Nevertheless, Marx now lived a comparatively less dangerous life in the sense that he was no longer in danger of governmental reprisal. Except for romantic figures like Garibaldi, the British government and people more or less ignored the many foreign revolutionary exiles in their midst, and Marx received similar treatment. The bailiff and the creditor replaced the police as his most immediate enemies. In 1864 the International Working Man's Association was founded in London, and Marx was, and remained, its leading figure. For some years the International did propaganda work, but the anarchist agitation of Bakunin —a man so dynamic that he could even stand up to the formidable `Red Terrorist Doctor' himself—led Marx in effect to crush the organization, by having its General Council meetings transferred to New York, rather than permit control of it to pass into other hands. As Marx saw the matter, Bakunin was yet another theorist guilty of leading the workers astray, and this above all things he could not abide. Marx always saw these false prophets as nothing less than intellectual traitors, and as such they were in his view more damnable than the overt theorists of reaction. Marx died in 1883, and his mantle fell on the shoulders of the everfaithful Engels, whose main task in the remaining years until his death in 1895 was the editing and translating of the works of Marx (including the second and third volumes of Capital) and the composition of upto-date introductions for new editions of these works. 1 Quoted in I. Berlin, Karl Marx.- His Life and Environment (Oxford University Press, 1963), P. 194.

II THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY

Like many other contemporary theorists, Marx gave an account of what he regarded as the essential features of human history from the time of man's appearance down to the middle of the nineteenth century. And this view of history was intended to be of a piece with his predictions concerning the course of future developments, and consequently also with his recommendations as to what now should be done. He was, as Michael Oakeshott has put it, a `retrospective prophet',' and this designation fits Marx as it fits many other eighteenthand nineteenth-century writers (Condorcet and Comte are good examples) who sought to add prestige and plausibility to their respective political philosophies by setting their recommendations in the context of a theory of history. To Marx the crucial activity of men was, quite simply, their joining together to struggle with their natural environment for their livelihood and to continue the species. When Marx and Engels referred to `economics', this is approximately what they meant: men winning in cooperation their means of existence from nature. This was man's vital activity, and his other activities were, in Marx's view, only to be understood in the light of these economic processes. Man had to live before he could make history, before he could engage in what Marx took to be less important pursuits. Thus the key to an understanding of human thought and practice during any particular period was an examination of how men went about the task of filling their stomachs and satisfying their other material needs—an examination, that is to say, of what Marx called `the mode of production'. Indeed, the successive historical periods were to be distinguished in terms of differences in the mode of production. The exploits of kings and generals, or the works of philosophers (to which other historians devoted much attention) were for Marx essentially secondary; they were epiphenomena, though history conceived in 1 Review of W. H. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History, Philosophical Quarterly, 11, 1952, p. 277.

16

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

purely political terms, which Marx considered `moderately close to reality',' was in his view certainly preferable to much contemporary German historiography, wherein the past was seen as a series of ideological conflicts and man's history was essentially the history of his consciousness. These German historians were guilty of making the assumption `that ideas and thoughts had dominated ... history ... that the history of ideas and thoughts constitutes all history ... [and consequently] after they had made the history of people's consciousness of themselves the basis of their actual history ... nothing was easier than, to call the history of consciousness, of ideas, the history of "Man" and to foist this on real history'., But political history, confining itself as it did to what Marx called the `high sounding dramas of princes and states, 3 still left much to be desired, for politics was properly to be made intelligible by reference to more fundamental economic factors. It followed that the task of the writer on politics was to make his subject matter intelligible by endeavouring `to trace political events back to .. . what were, in the final analysis, economic causes' 4 According to Engels, when speaking at the graveside of Marx, it was the latter who discovered ... the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence ... form[s] the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, the ideas on art, and even on religion of the people concerned have been evolved .5 Similarly Marx, having begun his career as an Hegelian in some respects, later claimed to have corrected the older man's misconceptions by, as it were, turning him the right way up: Hegel's conception of history [Marx wrote in 1845] assumes an abstract or Absolute Spirit which develops in such a way that mankind is a mere mass bearing it with a varying degree of consciousness or unconsciousness. Within empiric, exoteric history he therefore has a speculative, esoteric history develop. The history of 2 Ibid., p. 196. 3 Ibid., P. 48. 4 Engels, 1895 Introduction to `Class Struggles in France, 1848-50,' SfV1, P. 101. 5 SIVn, P. 1 53• 1 GI,

p. 51.

The Materialist Conception of History

17

mankind becomes the history of the abstract spirit, a spirit beyond all man!' In a famous passage in the first volume of Capital Marx explicitly contrasted his own theory of history with that of Hegel: My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel ... the process of thinking is the demiurgos of the real world; and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of "the Idea". With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind.2 And because it showed how the various other spheres of social activity were related to, and to a considerable extent, determined by, economic activity, historical materialism indicated that there should be a unified science of society rather than a number of more or less autonomous fields of social enquiry. Thus in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of z844, Marx undertook to treat political economy, law, ethics, politics, etc. in a series of pamphlets, and finally `in a special work to present them again as a connected whole showing the interrelationship of the separate parts'.3 According to Marx the errors engendered by considering the various areas of social activity in isolation could be illustrated by reference to politics. `Political understanding', Marx declared, `is political understanding precisely because it thinks within the limitations of politics.' Consequently the more acute political thought was, the less it was capable of perceiving the real nature of social evils. The classic period of political understanding [Marx continued] is the French Revolution. Far from perceiving the source of social defects in the principle of the state, the heroes of the French Revolution rather perceived in social defects the source of political abuses. Thus Robespierre saw in great poverty and great riches only an obstacle to pure democracy. Consequently, he desired to establish a general Spartan frugality .4 Though he did not make wholly clear his philosophical premises, Marx apparently held (in common with other `materialists') that the 2 p. 19. 3 p. 15. 'HF,p. t15. 4 `On the King of Prussia and Social Reform' in Karl Marx: Selected Essays, (ed. J. H. Stenning, Leonard Parsons, 1926), p. 119.

20

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

completely natural and absolutely valid. Thus as a doctrine it was, as Marx put it in Capital, a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisedom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.' Reference was made a little earlier to `the mode of production'—and Marx clearly used this term to designate those factors a knowledge of which would enable the observer to understand social activity during the course of successive historical eras. But what exactly did Marx mean when he spoke of `the mode of production?2 Its components seem to have been: first, labour itself; purposive activity, having as its object the satisfaction of human needs, which impinged upon and transformed nature, and which involved considerations of age, sex, physical strength and acquired skills. Human labour was characterized, as against the labour of the brutes, by the ability of the labourer to create in his mind an image of the end product of his efforts before he actually began work, and by his capacity increasingly to transform (in a sense to `humanize') the natural environment, thereby making the environment more conducive to human objectives. Secondly, Marx referred to the social organization of labour, including the crucial fact that in all but the most primitive societies men are organized into classes for work purposes. Thus the past was to be understood primarily in terms of struggles between classes basically defined in economic terms. And thirdly, there were what Marx called `the means of production'. These encompass the objects of labour (the soil, ores, timbers, etc.) and the instruments of labour, the tools `which the labourer interposes between himself and the subject of his labour', as Marx put it in Capital.3 And these instruments range from the tree 1 I, P. 20. 2 Here I follow closely the excellent account given by Vernon Venable in his book Human Nature: the Marxian View (D. Dobson, 1946), chap. 7. 3 1, P• 179•

The Materialist Conception of History

21

branch wielded by primitive man to the complex machines of modern industry. The picture which emerges from these considerations is of man being at once a maker of history and a controller of nature. There was, however, no rigid distinction between these two aspects of human activity, for it was Marx's contention that the sort of history men made was to a substantial degree determined by the manner in which they confronted nature with the aim of satisfying their needs. Thus Marx objected to history as political history and to history as the history of ideas because both omitted the consideration of what Marx called `the theoretical and practical relations of man to Nature',' that is to say, natural science and industry in the broadest sense. This, at least in part, would appear to be the rationale of Marx's suggestion, made in 1844, that at some future time there might be an amalgamation of the natural and the social sciences.2 Society and nature do indeed, as T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel have remarked,3 form a single system in Marx's theory. Man's history is to be understood as part of natural history, and his history, as we have just noticed, is to a very substantial extent the story of his `theoretical and practical relations ... to Nature', that is of his application of natural science to the processes of production. Thus the possibility arises that `the science of man will subsume under itself natural science'.4 Men, however, both in controlling nature and making history are never presented with what a modern writer has called `the blank sheet of infinite possibility'.5 They make their own history, but as Marx stated in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, `they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past's Besides the particular characteristics of their several natural environments, the men of one generation I HF, p. 2o1. 2 See EPM, p. I I1.

3 See their introduction to Karl Marx: Selected lFritings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (Watts, 1956), p. 2o, n. 1. 4 EPM, p. 111. 5 Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Methuen, 1962), p. 112. 6 SIV 1, p. 225. On this see also Marx's letter to Annenkov (28 December 1846), SC, PP. 40-1.

22

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

have handed down to them a more or less settled set of social arrangements, and only for certain generations will the opportunity of making a genuine revolution be at hand. Even in such a case, Marx insisted that the resultant form of society emerges from the `womb' of its predecessor and is not in any sense determined by the arbitrary whim of those responsible for the revolution. Thus in his classical statement of the doctrine of historical materialism, the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx stated that `no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the mater- . ial conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself'.' In this connection it is significant to note Engels's admission that he and Marx had been over-optimistic about the possibility of a successful working-class revolution in 1848 and the period immediately following. `History', he wrote almost half a century later, `has proved us ... wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the elimination of capitalist production ... which ... still had a great capacity for expansion.12 Marx further argued (as we have already noticed in the discussion of Marx's view of mechanical materialism) that while man is making history and controlling nature, he is also moulding his own nature. For Marx vigorously repudiated the notion that human nature has remained constant over time: `The human essence', he wrote in his sixth Thesis on Feuerbach, `is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.'3 Thus what men are is determined by what men actually do in their specific natural and social environment; and in transforming their environment, they at the same time transform themselves, evolving new needs and new capabilities: `by ... acting on the external world and changing it, [man] at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway'.4 And this assertion covers revolutions as well as man's less dramatic activities; therefore, in overthrowing particular régimes, `the changing of oneself coincides with the changing of circumstances' S Given these premises, Marx was able to write that `all history is nothing but a continuous transformation ' STS 1, P. 329. 4

Capital i, p. 177.

2 Ibid., p. 115. 1 GI, P. 230.

3 SIV u, P. 366.

The Materialist Conception of History

23

of human nature'' Two instances of this process may be referred to here: one from the distant past, the other from the near future as Marx envisaged it. According to Engels, the ape took the vital step in transforming itself into man when the use of the hands to assist movement over level ground was abandoned. This not only enabled the creature to assume an erect gait, but also released the hands to undertake more specialized functions than merely using clubs, throwing stones and collecting foods, to which they had been hitherto confined. `The specialization of the hand,' Engels told his readers, `this implies the tool, and the tool implies specific human activity, the transforming reaction of man on nature, production.'2 Engels hastened to add, furthermore, that the human hand is not only the organ of labour, but is the product of labour also, and his remarks well illustrate the Marxian notion that self-transformation is involved in the transformation of man's environment: Only by labour [Engels wrote], by adaptation to ever new operations, by inheritance of the thus acquired special development of muscles, ligaments and, over longer periods of time, bones as well, and by the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, has the human hand attained the high degree of perfection that has enabled it to conjure into being the paintings of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini.3 Human nature thus began when the ape was transformed by labour into man: but during much of the subsequent period, human nature had been determined by production wherein the driving force was not human needs as such, but human needs as mediated by the interests of the ruling class. However, Marx held that the proletariat, in making their revolution, would abolish the class-divided society in which the process of production had the result of stunting human nature and making men wretched, and in which the class that a man belonged to seemed to take on an existence independent of all individuals constituting it—to dominate their lives and thus to determine their `human nature' 4 Consequently, in the society after the revolution, a new sort of man would emerge, a being who, as Marx put it in The Economic and

' PP, p. 165.

4 See GI, P. 49-

2 SW 11, p. 68.

3 Ibid., p. 75 •

24

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

Philosophical Manuscripts of z8.44, would be `really human',' because production would no longer be directed by the interests of a privileged minority but would be guided by an overall rational plan which had reference solely to human needs. In Engels's Principles of Communism (the discarded draft of the Communist Manifesto), the notion that man changes his nature while revolutionizing his environment appeared quite clearly: Just as, a century ago, the peasant and the worker in manufacture were forced to change the whole of their habits and customs, and had to become totally different human beings, when they were swept into the current of large-scale industry, so also, when communal production shall have been introduced throughout the whole of society, and when, consequently, production will undergo a new evolution, different men will be needed to carry on the work of production, and indeed, different men will be engendered.2 Thus Marx rejected the notion of the constancy of human nature. This notion had previously been commonly accepted in Western thoughtand had been the presupposition of such theories of history as Machiavelli's. Rousseau, in contrasting primitive and civilized men, had clearly undermined the notion; but Marx was probably the first writer fully to exploit the idea that man by his activity determined his own nature. It is not surprising, therefore, to find him criticizing the idea of human nature which he encountered in the works of the classical political economists and the English Utilitarians. For instance, in Capital we read of Jeremy 1 T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel, op. cit., p. 244. See EPM, p. io2, for a slightly

different rendering of the passage concerned. It will be clear from later chapters that implicit in Marx's critique of capitalism was a conception of human nature transcendent of particular historical periods (see especially Marx on the intellectual `desolation' of the young, p. S 1 n 2 below). This was the case in the sense that men had certain more or less enduring capacities which were crushed by capitalism, but which would emerge and flourish in a future social system more appropriate to the life of human beings. Thus Marx does seem to have held some conception of a human nature inherent in at least most men. In Capital he appears to have made a distinction (though the passage concerned is not absolutely unequivocal) between `human nature in general' and `human nature as modified in each historical epoch' (i, p. Gog, n. 2). Perhaps this passage, though contained in a waspish footnote on Bentham, indicates the direction in which lay Marx's solution to the problem of how his assertions about the malleability of human nature were to be reconciled with the implication of his critique of capitalism.

2 R, P• 334•

The Materialist Conception of History

25

Bentham (`that insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the nineteenth century') that `with the driest naivete he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard measure ... he applies to past, present, and future." Marx and Engels expressed considerable satisfaction with man in his capacity as a controller of nature, especially as this capacity had been exhibited in capitalist systems. In the Communist Manifesto one is confronted with what can only be described as a eulogy of the bourgeoisie. This class, said the authors, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour.2 Nevertheless, as we shall see, the capitalist system was held by our authors to impose certain restrictions upon production because of its peculiar presupposition (i.e. the expectation of profit) and they therefore insisted that in a better-organized society, the level of production would be much higher even than that achieved in capitalist society. Impressive though man's activity had been as nature-controller, it was Marx's view that his performance in his other role of history-maker had been quite deplorable: indeed, Marx inclined to the view that man thus far had not succeeded in making any history properly so called, and he specifically remarked in his Preface to the Critique of Political Economy that it is only with the proletarian revolution that what he calls `the prehistory of human society13 will come to a close. Men had made deplorable history because they had hitherto been unable to take hold of their own destiny, unable to so order their world as to make it 1 I, p. 6o9.

2 S W 1, P- 37•

3 Ibid, p. 322=

26

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

conform with human needs and desires. History thus far had been largely the unplanned outcome of changes in the techniques of production together with the consequent clash of warring classes within society. The crucial difference between animals and man is the latter's capacity to transform his natural environment so as to avoid being at the mercy of natural contingency; yet compared with this proven capacity, man's inability to organize his society upon a rational basis was striking. In the most advanced industrial countries [wrote Engels] we have subdued the forces of nature and pressed them into the service of mankind; we have thereby infinitely multiplied production, so that a child now produces more than a hundred adults previously. And what is the consequence? Increasing overwork and increasing misery of the masses, and every ten years a great crash.... Only conscious organization of social production ... can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect in the same way that production in general has done this for men in their aspect as species.' Men's lives had been dominated by things, the very things which they created, and this was especially the case under capitalism, which had engendered a situation in which (as it has been put strikingly by Herbert Marcuse) `an uncontrolled economy legislates over all human relationships'.2 `Man's own deed', we read in the German Ideology, `becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.13 In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of z8,44, Marx developed this theme at some length as an explicitly ethical critique of capitalist society, and it is this ethical critique which modern writers have seen as the more or less suppressed normative premise of his later and purportedly scientific analysis of capitalism .4 In the 1844 manuscripts Marx, drawing upon the writings of the bourgeois economists (thus in a sense extracting a `confession' from his adversaries), painted a horrifying picture of capitalism as a misery-inducing system beset by class conflict, in which the worker is reduced to a ' Introduction to Dialectics of Nature (1946), p. 19. and Revolution (Routledge, 1 954), P• 273-

2 Reason 3P 4

44

Cf. Tucker, op. cit., especially pp. 12-13.

The Materialist Conception of History

27

bestial level of existence (if not actually starved) and in which the products of his labour seemed themselves to enslave him. Thus the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself ... becomes, the less belongs to him as his own ... [T]he greater ... [his] product, the less he is himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside 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.' Marx asserted, of course, that humanity was obliged to pass through this period of `prehistory', with all the torments it involved, for only at a certain stage of social and economic development was the opportunity offered to men of achieving the good life which he envisaged for them. If a communist society was to be established, what Marx called in Capital `a certain material groundwork' had to be present, and this, he held, was `the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development'.2 And Engels made this point about the necessary course of the `prehistory' of man more sharply when he ridiculed the unhistorical assumption which he found implicit in the works of certain bourgeois ideologists that `if Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Philip Augustus had introduced free trade instead of getting mixed up in the crusades we should have been spared five hundred years of misery and stupidity'.3 And, while Marx looked forward to the abolition of classes and class struggles, he stated quite explicitly that it was by the agency of class conflict that human advancement had in the past been secured: `No antagonism, no progress. This is the law that civilization has followed up to our days. Till now the productive forces have been developed by virtue of this system of class antagonisms.14 Using the understanding of the mode of production which has already been discussed, Marx and Engels produced their well-known division of Western European history into four periods: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism—the last (they thought) soon to give way to the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the era of primitive communism, all the members of the society, scarcely yet 'P. 70. 4 PP, p. 68. 3 SC, P. 542 (1893). 21, p. 80.

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

28

distinguishable from animals, were so close to the level of subsistence that there was no surplus to be appropriated by a ruling class. `It is only after men have raised themselves above the rank of animals,' Marx wrote, when therefore their labour has been to some extent socialized, that a state of things arises in which the surplus labour of the one becomes a condition of existence for the other." Subsequently, however, each historical epoch had been characterized by a particular form of class structure, and consequently by a particular form of class struggle, for it was inherent in the nature of classes to come into conflict with one another, and it is the class struggle which forms the reality behind political conflicts, many of which, however, present a quite different appearance. Thus it is on classes that Marx concentrated his attention, because, as he understood the matter, they are the vehicles of history. Each form of society, having a particular mode of production, was subverted and eventually overthrown by changes within the mode of production, and the consequent rise of a new class to the position of ruling class. Thus, just as the bourgeois class destroyed feudalism and replaced the feudal aristocracy as the ruling class, so the proletariat will soon destroy capitalism, strike down the bourgeoisie, and themselves become for a limited period the ruling class. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx traced the rise of the bourgeois class which was by the middle of the nineteenth century in the process of establishing their ascendancy throughout Europe: An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune, here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable `third estate' of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie .2 1 Capital,

i, p. 512.

2 Sdi/,1, PP- 34-5-

The Materialist Conception of History

29

Each new rising class, in an effort to forward their interests against the ruling (but doomed) class, were obliged to pose as the representatives of the general interests of the society as a whole while pointing out the selfishness of the present ruling class. The rising class, states the German Ideology, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society ... it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears ... as the representative of the whole of society ... confronting the one ruling class.' Thus the bourgeoisie in eighteenth-century France spoke in terms of liberty, and of the rights of man that the aristocracy were represented as violating. And Marx suggested in the German Ideology (but does not elaborate) that these claims made by a rising class to represent the general interest may be to some extent valid, `because under the pressure of hitherto existing conditions its interest has not yet been able to develop as the particular interest of a particular class'.2 Each new ruling class is more broadly based than its predecessor (the proletariat being, of course, the most broadly based of all rising classes), but the opposition to each new ruling class (with the exception of the proletariat) develops, Marx indicated, `all the more sharply and profoundly's so that the bourgeoisie had scarcely gained full control in modern society before they found themselves harried and haunted by the spectre of communism .4 Similarly Marx pointed in the Communist Manifesto to what might be termed the quickening pace of modern history. In discussing the process whereby members of the bourgeoisie in the localities were united into a single class on a national scale, he wrote of the `contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local 1 pp. 61-2. 2 p. 62. Marx is equivocal on this point, however; see PP, p. 153 where Marx seems to contradict directly this assertion.

GI, p. 62. I some cases they did not get as far as establishing themselves as the new ruling class. In Germany during the revolutionary period 1848-9 the bourgeoisie, I

4

while striving to overthrow the various feudal régimes, were terrified (according to Engels) by what they heard from Paris about the proletarian revolt of June 1848, which had only been suppressed with considerable bloodshed.

30

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes ... and that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years'.,. Marx, it will be clear from the foregoing, defined class basically in terms of economic function. A class for him was in essence a number of people bearing the same relationship to the means of production. The division of society into classes is thus correlated with the forces or techniques of production prevalent within a society at a particular historical stage. As Marx put it in The Poverty of Philosophy, `social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production ... the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist." The ruling class within a particular epoch were those people who owned and controlled the means of production, and this ownership and control made it possible to them to exploit those whom Marx called `the direct producers'3 in various ways, depending upon the mode of production involved. Under the feudal system, for instance, the serfs who constituted a majority of the direct producers had either to surrender a part of the produce of their strips of lands to their lord, or to give him a proportion of their labour time to put to his own use. Because of their position the ruling class were also able to exercise a large degree of control over the lives of the members of the oppressed classes. This domination was further strengthened by the tendency of the government, the courts, the army and the police to serve the interests of the ruling class, and by the fact that the dominant ideas would be those that promoted and safeguarded the interests of the ruling class. Marx, then, saw a great part of history as a record of continuing class struggles—freeman against slave, lord against serf, bourgeois against proletarian—and, as we have noticed, he divided the past into stages in terms of the forms of class struggle exhibited during successive periods. In the modern era of capitalism the class struggle had been simplified and was proceeding with added virulence. The capitalists who owned the means of production were pitted against the proletariat, the industrial working class—who owned but one significant saleable 2 p. I22. 3 Capital III 1962), p. 919. 1 S W I, P. 41-

The Materialist Conception of History

31

commodity, a work potential, which Marx called their `labour power'. The intermediate classes (independent shopkeepers, for instance) were gradually being eliminated by being, as Marx put it in Wage Labour and Capital, `hurled down',. into the proletariat, a fate that also awaited the less efficient and ruthless capitalists who were unable to withstand the buffetings sustained during the periodic economic crises which afflicted capitalist society, and the competition of their fellow capitalists. `One 12 capitalist', Marx observed, `always kills many. Some Marxists, and indeed Marx himself on occasion, have given the impression that they consider the economic element to be the only causal factor acting in history: such a standpoint is sometimes called `vulgar Marxism'. But such a proposition is not to be taken as a proper reflection of Marx's own thought, although Engels did confess in 1890 that he and Marx had perhaps exaggerated the importance of the economic factor in order to counteract the various idealist tendencies which they had experienced in Germany in the first half of the century. Some of their followers, Marx and Engels also complained, were using the doctrine of historical materialism as an excuse for not studying history: it was being used as a set of a priori dogmas rather than as a framework for empirical enquiry. In a letter written to Schmidt in the same year, Engels clearly asserted what might be called the interactive relationship between economic and other factors in history. Analysing the deficiencies of certain contemporary German writers, he stated:

They always see only here cause, there effect. That this is a hollow abstraction, that such metaphysical polar opposites exist in the real world only during crises, while the whole vast process goes on in the form of interaction—though of very unequal forces, the economic movement being by far the strongest, most primordial, most decisive—that here everything is relative and nothing absolute— this they never begin to see .3 And in a rather different connection Marx, in his well-known Letter on the Economic Development of Russia of 1877 (evidently wishing not wholly to discount the possibility that Russia could avoid `all the sudden turns of fortune of the capitalist system '¢) disclaimed any 3 SC, P. 5072 Capital i, p. 763. 1 SWr I, P. 97. 4 RM, p. 217. That is to say, by moving from a feudal type of social and economic organization to some kind of communism based upon the `mir', the traditional village commune.

32

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

`supra-historical' theory and, like Engels, stressed the necessity for empirical research into the actual development of particular societies., Ideas, according to Marx and Engels, could not make history; but it did not follow from this that ideas are wholly devoid of influence. Indeed, had Marx really held that ideas had no significant role to play in history, there would have been a gross inconsistency, between his theory and his practice, and it was always Marx's contention that his theory and his practice were perfectly assimilated. He himself commented sadly that he had sacrificed his life, his health and his family to his revolutionary writings, and such sacrificial endeavour would have been incomprehensible had he believed that ideas were of no consequence, that economic factors were the sole determinants in history. Similarly, if he had held that politics was of little importance, his emphasis on the destruction of the contemporary state machine and its replacement by the `dictatorship of the proletariat' would have been strange indeed. Marx and Engels said on several occasions that the relationship between economic factors and consciousness was one of interaction: ideas could, in Engels's words, `react upon ... the economic basis12 of society itself, though the latter was by far the most important factor. Thus Marx held that a class, and in particular the proletariat, would succeed more quickly and with less waste of human life and substance, if its members could be brought rapidly to a consciousness of their historical position, interests and possible aspirations.3 It seems, then, that Marx and Engels were quite justified in their protests that they were not `vulgar Marxists': similarly a good case could be made for their assertions concerning the empirically-based nature of their theories. But there is, nevertheless, a sense in which Marxism certainly was a `supra-historical' theory. It was `supra-historical' in the sense that there are certain hypotheses 1 See also Engels's other well-known pronouncement about how the materialist

conception of history was to be understood: `Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic basis. It is not that the economic situation is cause, solely active, while everything else is only passive effect. There is, rather, interaction on the basis of economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself' (letter to Starkenburg, SC (1894), P. 549, emphasis in original). 2 SC (1894), P. 549• 3 See below, PP- 8 4-5.

The Materialist Conception of History

33

about contemporary history that Marxism would rule out as being impossible. Thus Marx and Engels always insisted that the forthcoming revolution could only be the work of the proletariat, just possibly at the polling booths but much more likely on the barricades, with some assistance from intellectuals and others who were able to detect the course that would be taken by the class struggle. Any other manner of bringing about communist society from the starting point of Western capitalism they regarded as inconceivable. Consequently they had no time for any suggestion that the capitalists might undergo a change of heart and proclaim the communist society of their own accord, and that the communist movement should accordingly devote itself to this end. Indeed, much of their case against the various other forms of left-wing belief current during their lifetime was that these beliefs presupposed courses of events which could not occur. For example, in discussing the `Young England' movements as an instance of what they called `Feudal Socialism', they argued in the Communist Manifesto that this kind of socialism originated amongst the old aristocracy who, enraged by the fact that they had been displaced as the ruling class by the upstart bourgeoisie, flew to the side of the downtrodden masses with scathing critiques (such as those of Thomas Carlyle) of modern capitalist society: `In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.', The beliefs that a person held about the world and how it should be ordered, and about the next world, were often, according to Marx, a reflection of that person's position in society, however distorted and fantastic the reflection might be. The role of religious beliefs within capitalist society provided an interesting example of this: `Religious distress,' Marx declared in The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, `is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.... Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself.12 It followed that men could not be emancipated from 2 OR, P. 42. 1 STV1, p. 5z, emphasis added.

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

34

The Materialist Conception of History

earth. The social principles of Christianity declare all vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either the just punishment of original sin and other sins or trials that the Lord in his infinite wisdom imposes on those redeemed. The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, dejection, in a word all the qualities of the canaille; and the proletariat, not wishing to be treated as canaille, needs its courage, its self-feeling, its pride and its sense of independence more than its bread.'

the grip which religion had on their intellects until the condition which gave rise to religion (i.e. oppression within the class-divided society) was itself abolished. Marx explained further in Capital that the religious reflex of the real world can ... only ... finally vanish, when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellow men and to Nature. The life process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.' Therefore Marx reasoned that religious beliefs would not have to be `abolished' by some future authoritative edict: rather he held that they would disappear along with the social conditions which elicited them. The dominant ideas of a particular historical period would, however, be the ideas of the ruling class, whose ideologists would, consciously or unconsciously, foist their beliefs on to members of other classes who were not clearly aware of their objective situation and who were therefore led to subscribe to ideas fundamentally alien to themselves— ideas which benefited their oppressors. `The class, which is the ruling material force of society', Marx wrote, `is at the same time its ruling intellectual force';2 and in the course of an article written in 1847 he illustrated this proposition by explaining what he took to be the ideological role played by Christianity in the class struggles of Western society, showing the facility with which the faith was adapted to the purposes of successive ruling classes: The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of Antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages and equally know, when necessary, how to defend the oppression of the proletariat, although they make a pitiful face over it. The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and all they have for the latter is the pious wish the former will be charitable. The social principles of Christianity transfer the consistorial councillors' adjustment of all infamies to heaven and thus justify the further existence of those infamies on 11> PP- 79-81.

2 GI, p. 6o.

35

Besides Christianity, the ideology which perhaps most frequently attracted Marx's attention was the body of economic theory that he called bourgeois or classical political economy. We have already observed that Marxian social science drew heavily upon classical political economy, and indeed Marx was not slow to acknowledge his debt to writers like Adam Smith and Ricardo, to whom he attributed considerable scientific intent.2 But the assertion of classical political economy that there existed an identity of interest between the workers and their capitalist employers was to Marx a misleading and therefore pernicious piece of special pleading that he made it his task to refute. He gave an account of this theory at the end of Chapter G of the first volume of Capital where, after a reference to the associated doctrine of the natural rights of man (`Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham13) he explained to his readers the bourgeois view that the only force which brings together the possessors of these natural rights `is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all.14 The supposed identity of interests consisted in nothing more, he argued, 1 OR,

PP. 82-3. 2 For Marx's distinction between `scientific' and `vulgar' political economy, see below, P. 46, n. 4. 3 p. 176. `Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity ... are con-

strained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents.... Equality, because each enters into relation with the other ... and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself.' 4

Ibid.

36

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

than the fact that in a capitalist system the worker needs the capitalist to whom he can sell his labour power, while the capitalist needs the worker, since it is from the exploitation of the worker that his profits arise. From the standpoint of the proletarian, this identity of interest was somewhat less than impressive: `As long as the wage-worker is a wage-worker, his lot depends upon capital. That is the much-vaunted community of interests between worker and capitalist." In Wage Labour and Capital, Marx appeared to have a good deal less sympathy with bourgeois political economists than with the bourgeoise themselves, and it was upon the writers that he turned his withering sarcasm: To say that the most favourable condition for wage labour is the most rapid possible growth of productive capital is only to say that the more rapidly the working class increases and enlarges the power that is hostile to it, the wealth that does not belong to it and that rules over it, the more favourable will be the conditions under which it is allowed to labour anew at increasing bourgeois wealth, at enlarging the power of capital, content with forging for itself the golden chains by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its train.2 Nevertheless, Marx asserted in the Communist Manifesto that the ruling ideologies could not indefinitely captivate the minds of everyone (even in the ruling class) and that, for example, as the forthcoming revolution approached, some members of the bourgeoisie would desert to the cause of the proletariat, `the class that holds the future in its hands',3 who in the meantime would have developed their own particular social and political theories: `Just as ... at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.'¢ Presumably it was along these lines that Marx and Engels justified their own position: having detected the inevitable outcome of the present situation, they identified themselves with that class with whom lay the future.5 Yet their socialism, it is abundantly clear, was a moral judgment and 2 Ibid., p. 9i. 1 SIV i, p. 87. 5 See also below, p. 92.

3 Ibid., P. 41.

4 Ibid., PP. 41-2.

The Materialist Conception of History

37

a moral injunction as well as a factual prediction; as Vernon Venable has put it: ` "It will come" they said as scientists, and as ethicists they nodded approval." Similarly, Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law and one of Marx's close associates at the end of the latter's life, reported him as saying that `science must not be a selfish pleasure. Those who have the good fortune to be able to devote themselves to scientific pursuits must be the first to place their knowledge at the service of humanity.12 And there can be little doubt as to the way in which Marx understood his obligation to put his knowledge at the service of humanity. The reference to Marx as an `ethicist' introduces the subject of Marx's ethical theory, a subject which has not infrequently troubled his interpreters, and indeed one which will receive no confident treatment here. Marx's emphasis on a science of socialism, on prediction and empirically grounded theory, has induced some writers to believe that he had no ethical theory whatsoever to offer. Werner Sombart, for instance, considered that `Marxism is distinguished from all other socialist systems by its anti-ethical tendency. In all of Marxism ... there is not a grain of ethics, and consequently no more of an ethical judgment than an ethical postulate.'3 Even the Tsarist Russian censor viewed Capital 1, though recognizing its socialist content, as a strictly `mathematical, scientific demonstration',4 and accordingly regarded the work as suitable for publication in Russia. In recent years, however, particularly with the publication of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of z844, commentators have tended to take a very different view of his theory as a whole. More especially, the striking humanism of the 1844 manuscripts has been detected also in Marx's later works, so that the continuity of the works of the `Young Philosopher' and the `Old Economist' has been thus exhibited. Dr Tucker; for instance, writes that Marx's `Kritik of political economy first took shape in 1844 as a philosophical conception according to which man loses himself in the historical act of producing a world in alienated labour, meaning productive activity performed under the compulsion of greed ... [I]t remained this in essence when Marx brought forth the completed version in Capital twenty three years after.'5 Nature: the Marxian View, p. 342 Reminiscences of Marx and Engels (ND), p. 723 Quoted by Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, p. 12. 5 Op. cit., P. 212. 4 Quoted by Schwarzchild, The Red Prussian, p. 364. 1 Human

38

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

Now whether or not this sort of analysis is wholly satisfactory, the substantial element of morality in Marx's works no longer needs to be pointed out. Although he did not believe in any system of morality which had universal validity, he certainly regarded capitalism in the advanced countries of Western Europe and North America not only as a system destined for swift supersession, but also as an ethically repugnant system which crushed and psychologically dismembered the people subjected to it. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of z844, the young Marx's moral critique of capitalism is presented largely in terms of human `alienation'. The concept of alienation had both descriptive and prescriptive content. Fundamentally it referred to the tendency of objects and institutions that men have made or established to serve their purposes, to dominate their lives and to appear hostile to them. Thus the product of the labours of the proletarian did not belong to him, but to the capitalist for whom it became private property, and it was in the service of private property that the proletarian (owning only his `labour power') was driven, in effect involuntarily, into the employ of the capitalist. `If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, 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 be delight and his life's joy. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over men." Thus private property was the consequence of alienated labour, and behind the alien objects stood the men who constituted the ruling class. Moreover, alienation occurred not only in respect of the product, but also with respect to the act of production: `The product is after all but the summary of the activity of production. If then the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity.... In the estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarized the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labour itself.' Alienation was thus self-alienation, `the loss of ... self .2 The outcome, so far as the worker is concerned, was that his labour, far from constituting the fulfilment of his human potentialities, merely became a means of renewing his physical existence, in fact `life itself 1 P. 792 —Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 28,44, PP. 7 2, 73.

The Materialist Conception of History

39

appears only as a means to life'.' Being deprived of fulfilment during his interminable hours of labour, the worker was reduced in his own time to merely bestial functions, `eating, drinking, procreating, etc." Marx's general conclusion about the capitalist system as a whole was that within it

labour 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 labour by machines—but some of the workers it throws back to a barbarous type of labour, and the other workers it turns into machines. It produces intelligence—but for the worker idiocy, cretinism.3 Marx, then, opposed capitalism as a system of society, a system which in Western Europe was frustrating most human ends and potentialities. He made the manner of his opposition to capitalism as a system clear in the Preface to the first edition of Capital is I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them 4 It would seem to be the implication of this approach that moral condemnation of individual capitalists was no part of Marx's concern, for there is a sense in which they too are the victims of the capitalist system, though while they remained in business they did not suffer as their workers suffered. And to a substantial degree this would seem to be the case. In Chapter 24 of the same work, Marx gave a most significant account of the predicament of the individual bourgeois trying to maintain his position, an account which clearly evidences his attempt to write such a `natural history' of capitalism as he promised in his Preface. Fanatically bent [Marx writes] on making value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production's sake; 4 p. io. 3 Ibid., P- 7i. 2 Ibid., P. 73. 1 Ibid., p. 75.

40

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society, and creates those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society.... Only as personified capital is the capitalist respectable. As such, he shares with the miser the passion for wealth as wealth. But that which in the miser is a mere idiosyncrasy, is, in the capitalist, the effect of the social mechanism, of -which he is but one of the wheels. Moreover, the development of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount of the capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist, as external coercive laws. It compels him to keep constantly extending his capital, in order to preserve it, but extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation.'

However, the evidence of Marx's various writings strongly suggests that he did not always sustain what appears to be the logic of his statement in the Preface of Capital i. That is to say, from time to time he slipped without much difficulty into the normal idiom of praise and blame for individuals, and in Capital i there are instances of this. Thus Marx spoke of the capitalists who will finally be expropriated by the workers as `a few usurpers',z and he further described the actual process of usurpation in severely moralistic terms: `The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious.'3 In the interests of logical propriety it would perhaps have been better if this sort of remark had not been made by Marx, and he had confined himself to the elucidation of the character of the capitalist system as such. But Marx, it would seem, had within him too much moral indignation to be a completely logical writer. And it should not be forgotten, of course, that a very large proportion of what was written by Marx and Engels was of a polemical or a journalistic nature, and in these writings our authors occasionally tended to lapse into the idiom of the genre. Marx and Engels thus argued that their socialism sprang from an objective appraisal of the potentialities inherent within the specific 1 p. 592, emphasis added.

2

p. 764.

3 p. 762.

The Materialist Conception of History

41

economic and political situation in Western Europe and the United States. Marx claimed in 1848 that `the theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes." Marx and Engels insisted again and again that their beliefs were not the result of preconceived ideas, but were based upon an examination of real men and their relationships, as these were evolving historically. Their socialism, Engels affirmed, was `scientific' because it looked for its triumph to the inevitable course of events. Scientific socialists therefore claimed to have detected the tendencies latent within capitalist society, the ultimate outcome of which would be the classless society. Thus Marx and Engels repudiated not only any form of socialism whose adherents looked back with longing to previous social relationships and hoped for their restoration, but also what Marx called `Bourgeois Socialism', which he supposed to spring from a desire to stave off the evil day of the inevitable proletarian rising by making timely concessions to working-class demands. Finally, Marx and Engels rejected `Utopian Socialism', and it is perhaps in this context that their own conception of socialism emerges most clearly. There were various kinds of utopian socialism (St Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen seemed to Marx and Engels to be the leading exponents of this type of doctrine), but they were all the product of an early stage in the development of the class struggle within capitalist society. Accordingly, it was now necessary (the useful criticism which the utopians had made of capitalism notwithstanding) that these doctrines should be superseded by the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels; for a continued adherence to utopian beliefs could only have the effect of misleading the workers and retarding their movement towards the dictatorship of the proletariat and towards the classless society. Precisely because utopian socialism was the product of an early stage in the class struggle engendered by capitalism, the authors concerned tended to ignore the positive historical potentialities inherent within the still immature proletariat; for them the working class only suffered. Consequently, the utopians did not speak (as Marx and Engels spoke) 3 STV I, p. 44•

42

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

for the working class as history-making force: rather they spoke in the name of justice and humanity, relying for their vindication not upon history but rather upon the self-evident merit of their particular systems, supported (in the cases of Fourier and Owen) by small-scale experiments designed to produce a working model of the new society. The Communist Manifesto states that: The undeveloped state of the class struggle as well as their own surroundings, cause Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?, The utopian socialists were thus at once naïve and unhistorical, attempting preposterously to impose from without a rational design upon society, and in consequence their ideas stood condemned in the estimation of Marx and Engels: Not one of them appears as a representative of that proletariat which historical development had ... produced. Like the French philosophers [of the Enlightenment], they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice ... if pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen ... is not an inevitable event ... but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born Soo years earlier, and might then have spared humanity Soo years of error, strife and suffering.2 In general, then; scientific socialism purported to be historical in approach, and realistic in that it indicated the only manner in which the proletariat could be emancipated and a socialist society instituted. By ' SIB 1, PP. 58-92 Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, SITE II, p. io9.

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43

bringing together the accounts given by Marx in his famous letter to Weydemeyer of 5 March 1852, and by Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, it may be possible to discover what were the more specific characteristics of scientific socialism. Discussing the matter of what distinctive contribution he had made to social theory, Marx asserted that his originality consisted in proving `(1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society'.' A quarter of a century later, Engels spoke of `the materialistic conception of history'2 a distinctive feature of scientific socialism, but referred also to the unmasking of surplus value as the secret of capitalist production. `With these discoveries', Engels claimed, `socialism became a science.'3 3 Ibid. 2 S LV 11, p. 1.2 5. 1 SC, p. 86.

arx's Model of Capitalism

III MARX'S MODEL OF CAPITALISM

Marx's analysis of capitalism was contained in the four volumes of Capital, and in several, less famous, pamphlets. In Capital r is to be found what might be called an abstract, or `ideal-type' model of capitalism which sought to bring out what Marx took to be the outstanding and distinguishing features of nineteenth-century economic processes. And the fact that Marx dealt here largely in abstractions did not in any way prevent him inserting a great deal of concrete illustrative material. In the second and third volumes the abstract model is to some extent `filled in' by the reintroduction of problems and elements which had been purposely excluded in the first volume. The model, therefore, though drawn substantially from Marx's knowledge of British capitalism, was not intended to be exactly representative of any particular capitalist system, but it was nevertheless put forward as an accurate representation of the inherent tendencies of capitalism which would assert themselves in due course in the countries concerned: `It is the ultimate aim of this work', Marx wrote of Capital i, `to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society." In this sense, the model had predictive intent. Capitalism, the social system of Western Europe and North America in Marx's time, was characterized by the more or less continuous, single-minded and competitive pursuit of private profit by those who owned the means of production. They purchased the labour power, or work potential, of the working class, whose members, unlike the serfs of old, were not tied to the land and could decide whether or not to work, and for whom. As the former choice was usually one between starving and staying alive, Marx was not persuaded that being formally free in this way constituted a great benefit for the proletarians. In a passage in the Principles of Communism, Engels gave a succinct account of the position of the serf and that of the modern proletarian: `The serf', he wrote, `owned and utilized an instrument of production ... The serf can gain his liherty ... by a variety of methods [thus being able to] enter the ranks of the possessing class and enter the 'Preface, p. io.

45

circle of competition. The proletarian can attain to freedom only by abolishing competition, private property and every class distinction." Exploitation of the workers by the capitalists was a further outtanding feature of capitalist enterprises. To give an impression of what s Marx meant when he said that the workers were `exploited' by their employers, some account must be given of the `labour theory of value', an integral part of the Marxian system. Marx believed that the exchange value of a commodity was approximately determined by the amount (i.e. the duration) of labour necessary to produce it. This labour theory of value involved the intellectual operation of transforming all concrete human labour with its varying characteristics into abstract, or standard, labour, the sole measure of which was time. And the duration of this standard labour would vary with the degree of advancement of the techniques of production involved. The labour embodied in a commodity was of two kinds. There was `living labour', which was contributed by the workers immediately engaged in its production; and also `past labour', by which term Marx designated the efforts of those who made available the raw materials concerned, and of those who produced the machines involved in the process of production. A machine was held by Marx to transfer over its life span its total value to the goods which it produced. A commodity was thus said by Marx to have a value because it was `a crystallization of social labour'.2 Similarly, the price of a commodity was understood to be `nothing but the monetary expression of value' .3 Accordingly, `the market price expresses only the average amount of social labour necessary, under the average conditions of production, to supply the market with a certain mass of a certain article1,4 though Marx stated that there will be marginal fluctuations in price due to supply and demand. The fact that the exchange value of a commodity was approximately determined by the amount of standard labour embodied in it was also the root of a phenomenon, peculiarly characteristic of capitalist society, 1 R, P- 3 232

SW I, P. 379-

3 Ibid., P. 382. But cf. Capital, where his statements on this point became much

more cautious: in the first volume, for instance, he wrote of the duration of labour as `that which forms the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value' (P• 71)•

4 Ibid., P. 383.

46

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

that Marx called the `fetishism of commodities'. This phrase referred to the `mystical character" of commodities in capitalist society. Like the gods described by Feuerbach (the analogy was Marx's) commodities seemed to take on a separate existence, and to act independently so as `to rule the producers instead of being ruled by them'.2 The respective exchange values of commodities which determined their mutual interrelationships, appeared mysteriously as inherent qualities of the commodities, akin to physical characteristics, and thereby greatly exercised the minds of economists bent upon the discovery of the laws governing economic processes. And this appearance remained for most men long after the enunciation of the labour theory of value by Marx and his predecessors had revealed the true source of exchange value. Further, the relationships of commodities mirrored fantastically the human relationships in capitalist society: `There is a definite social relationship between men, that assumes in their eyes the fantastic form of a relation between things.'3 Thus it appeared that in this society, which the `vulgar' economists declared to be natural and eternal,4 everyone had something to exchange—the capitalist his product, the proletarian his labour power, etc.—and men were related primarily through the exchange of their commodities. Therefore, as Herbert Marcuse has put it, `the social status of individuals, their standard of living, the satisfaction of their needs, their freedom and their power are all determined by the value of their commodities' .5 Marx's use of the labour theory of value, unlike Ricardo's, had radical implications, as we shall see presently. Labour power, which the proletarian sold on a contractual basis to the capitalist, was in this sense no different from any other commodity, and its value (i.e. roughly the worker's wage) would be indicative of the amount of labour needed to produce his own labour power, and to provide for the continued availability of labour power in future generations. In short, the worker would tend to be paid just sufficient to keep him alive and to allow him ' Capital r, P. 71. 2 Ibid., P. 753 Ibid., P. 72. 4 Marx made a distinction between `scientific' bourgeois economy and `vulgar' bourgeois economy. The exponents of the former, while falling victim to many illusions, were genuinely concerned with the discovery of truth, while the exponents of the latter, far from being `disinterested inquirers', were nothing more than `hired prize fighters' for the bourgeoisie who put `in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and evil intent of apologetic' (ibid., p. 15). s Reason and Revolution, p. 279.

Marx's Model of Capitalism

47

to reproduce his kind,' for a propertyless proletariat was essential to the continuance of the capitalist system. It was usually the case that a worker could produce in a day goods far exceeding in value his subsistence wage. Labour power was thus unique as a commodity in that it could produce more in terms of exchange value than it was itself worth. Marx explained that the value of labouring power is determined by the quantity of labour power necessary to maintain or reproduce it, but the use of that labouring power is only limited by the active energies and physical strength of the labourer. The daily or weekly value of the labouring power is quite distinct from the daily or weekly exercise of that power, the same as the food a horse wants and the time it can carry a horseman are quite distinct.' Thus Marx was led to see the working day as divided into two parts. First, there was that portion of the day during which the worker produces goods equal in value to the wage he receives, and this he called `necessary labour time'. During the rest of the day (`surplus labour time') the worker's efforts served merely to provide the capitalist with what Marx called `surplus value'. This represents, when the cost of machines, buildings, rent, etc., is taken into account, the profit which a capitalist could expect from his activities. It followed, of course, that the capitalist had a vital interest in prolonging à outrance the working day. By extending the working day what Marx called `absolute surplus value' was pumped out of the worker by his employer. Marx also introduced the conception, seemingly more relevant for the later phases of capitalist development (when legal limits were often placed upon the length of the working day), of `relative surplus valueI .3 This relative surplus value was extracted not by lengthening working hours, but by curtailing the proportion of necessary labour time included in the working day. This curtailment is brought about in two ways. First, increased productivity (occasioned by the introduction of ' Though Marx did allow for some influence to be exerted by supply and demand, and also made reference to `a traditional standard of life' which may be maintained under capitalism although the wages necessary to do so are higher than those which would merely allow the worker to subsist (see Wages, Price and Profit, SW I, PP. 400-1). 2 SW I, P. 387 ) emphasis in original. 3 See Capital i, p. 5o8 ff.

48

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

new machines, etc.) lowered the price of goods, and where these goods were, as Marx put it, `habitually consumed by the labourers',1 a shortening of necessary labour time was the outcome. Secondly, an increase in the intensity of labour increases output without lowering the price of the particular commodities concerned, and thus again the time taken by the worker to produce goods equal in value to his wages was shortened. On the basis of this reasoning about the dual composition of the working day, Marx concluded in The Poverty of Philosophy that `the rise and fall of profits and wages expresses merely the proportion in which capitalists and workers share in the product of a day's work',2 and in support of his contention that the working day could be divided in this manner, Marx pointed out that most capitalists do in fact operate at a profit, although in the long run most of them could expect to be put out of business by their more efficient competitors. The retention by the bourgeois of this `surplus value' was the act of exploitation which Marx took to be the secret of capitalist production. And it was a secret which required no little perspicacity to detect, because capitalist exploitation, unlike previous more obvious forms of exploitation (such as that connected with feudalism) had a deceptive appearance of fairness in so far as the worker seemed to be paid in respect of his total work time, not merely a part of that time. Thus it was the cardinal part of Marx's indictment of the capitalist system that under it men were exploited, part of the product of their efforts was taken away by the employer. Consequently, for Marx and Engels perhaps the most poignant of the many `contradictions' to be found within capitalism was that production was a social activity in which the many cooperated, while appropriation of the proceeds was strictly on an individual basis and confined to the few. This, however, was but one element in Marx's powerful critique of nineteenth-century capitalism. Another striking feature of the capitalist system was what Marx described as the `anarchy of production'. By this phrase he wished to indicate and expose the absence of any sort of a plan, or overall scheme for cooperation, to guide production within society. Marx contrasted the individual factory, wherein affairs were minutely regulated, with the society as a whole in which economic regulation was conspicuous by its absence. Marx's social world closely resembled the popular picture of Charles Darwin's natural world, with 2 p. 189. 1 See Capital 1, p. 525.

árx's Model of Capitalism

49

ferocious competition resulting in the survival of those best equipped. In this connection, Engels was able to write that `Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote ... on his countrymen when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom." This lack of any overall scheme to regulate production resulted in the booms and ever-deepening slumps displayed by business in capitalist societies. Marx and Engels believed that ultimately an economic slump would provoke the proletariat to revolt against and destroy the capitalist system. The basic cause of these recurrent economic crises was the fact that the proletarians, being paid only subsistence wages, could not afford to buy the goods in the manufacture of which they cooperated. Thus, in explaining economic crises in Capital, Marx pointed to `the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses' and contrasted this with `the drive of modern capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit'.2 In these recurrent economic crises, the unplanned and anarchic character of capitalist society was cruelly exhibited. Marx argued in the projected fourth volume of Capital that because the driving motive of capitalist production was the expansion of surplus value, there was a clear sense in which producers were in fact obliged to be over producers, for `the greatest part of the producers, the workers, can only consume an equivalent for their product so long as they produce more than this equivalent—surplus value or surplus product. They must always be over-producers, must always produce over and above their needs, in order to be able to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs.'3 Periodically, this contradiction inherent in capitalist production engendered an economic crisis, wherein, as Marx put it, sale and purchase, having become independent of one another in planless capitalist society, are brought together. The difficulty [he explained] in transforming the commodity into money, in selling, arises simply from the fact that the commodity 1 Introduction to the Dialectics of Nature, p. 19, emphasis in original.

2 III, PP• 472-3. 3 Theories of Surplus Value (1951), pp. 397-8; this is the title given to the

volume of translated selections from Marx's manuscript.

50

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

must be transformed into money, but there is no need for the money to be immediately transformed into commodity, and therefore sale and purchase may fall asunder.... And crisis is nothing but the forcible assertion of the unity of phases of the production process which have become independent of each other., Further, in all but the most prosperous times, many proletarians would be unemployed, and would constitute what Marx called an `industrial reserve army', the existence of which would enable the capitalist to discipline his workers more severely and to exploit them more outrageously; and if the proletarian sent his wife or children out to work in an effort to supplement the family income, he would merely be throwing them also `under the Juggernaut wheels of Capital',2 while at the same time almost certainly adding to the industrial reserve army and thereby jeopardizing his own chances of continued employment. As we have seen, a substantial body of men owning virtually nothing but their own labour power was an essential characteristic of the capitalist system, and in consequence continued existence was guaranteed to the proletariat as a class, but for the particular individuals constituting the proletariat, nothing was guaranteed under capitalism, and in some respects the condition of each might be inferior even to that of a slave: The slave is excluded from competition; the proletarian is beset by competition and is a prey to all its fluctuations. The slave is counted a thing and not a member of society; the proletarian is looked upon as a person, as a member of bourgeois society. The slave can, therefore, secure better conditions of life than can the proletarian, though the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of development than the slave.3 Capitalist competition sooner or later obliged the employer to reduce his production costs by replacing his employees by machines. And where the employees concerned were troublesome and rebellious, increased mechanization would be greeted by the capitalist as a liberation and would consequently tend to be introduced sooner rather than later. 1

Theories of Surplus Value, p. 383•

ST1r, P• 398' Engels, Principles of Communism, R, p. 322. 2

Marx's Model of Capitalism

51

The men still employed would then be reduced increasingly to the status of mere machine-minders. By this process, therefore, the capitalist is able to dispense with the services of the skilled man as such, to whom he had previously been constrained to pay comparatively high wages (on account of the apprenticeships, training, etc. needed to produce his labour power). Machines were ... the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labour. [For instance] the self-acting mule, the greatest invention of modern industry, put out of action the spinners who were in revolt. If combinations and strikes had no other effect than that of making the efforts of mechanical genius react against them, they would still exercise an immense influence on the development of industry., Further, the more or less complete elimination of skill greatly increased the competition among the workers themselves, for what modern industry required of them (notwithstanding the immense productiveness of their work) could be performed by almost any man, woman, or even by a child.2 In the long run the situation of the working man and his family was seen by Marx as becoming more and more desperate. Their ranks would be swelled by the smaller capitalists unable to keep pace with the drive towards ever-increasing mechanization. The growing wretchedness of the working class and the concentration of capital were thus correlated factors. The introduction of more and better machines, had, moreover, another important effect. Because profits arose solely in respect of the exploitation of the worker, greater mechanization, though essential to keep the capitalist in business by lowering his production costs, tended to diminish the rate of profit, that is, the ratio of surplus value to the total capital advanced by the capitalist. Thus the capitalist was obliged, while frantically seeking greater sales, to exploit ever more cruelly the 1

PP, P. 1sq.

The impact of capitalism on all kinds of workers is depicted by Marx in a sufficiently horrific manner, but he evidently found particularly repulsive the crushing of minors. In Capital he wrote of the `intellectual desolation artificially produced by converting immature human beings into mere machines for the fabrication of surplus-value', a state of mind clearly distinguishable `from that natural ignorance which keeps the mind fallow without destroying its capacity for development, its natural fertility' (1, P. 399). 2

ME—H

52

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

men remaining in his employ. Therefore, at the same time that the industrial reserve army was gaining fresh recruits, the lot of those still having jobs became ever more deplorable. In discussing the actual general level of wages, Marx displayed considerable caution, and in a well-known passage in Capital he indicated that his doctrine of increasing misery is to some extent independent of the general wage-level: `In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse." He certainly did not believe that the absolute level of wages would necessarily fall continuously as capitalism developed, and he urged the workers to make the most of whatever opportunities arose with respect to the state of the labour market to improve (if only temporarily) their economic position. But a fair conclusion to be drawn from his economic writings as a whole would seem to be that he anticipated no sharp and general rise in the level of wages; for it is clear from his analysis of the entire capitalist system that (as he put it in Wages, Price and Profit) the `development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man'.' And in Capital, Marx was consequently able to describe the capitalist (`Mr Moneybags') and the labourer as having very different demeanours as they approached the labour market, `the one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but—a hiding's While the condition of the working class thus deteriorates in almost every respect, the individual bourgeois is himself caught in what might be described as the `whirlpool' of capitalism. Competition becomes fiercer, staying in business becomes harder, and the very processes whereby the bourgeoisie as a class seek severally to preserve themselves merely have the effect of hardening the resolve of the workers to make an end of the capitalist régime. And there are passages in Marx's works where he shows himself to be not wholly unappreciative of the predicament of the capitalist as a victim of the capitalist system. In p. 645, emphasis added. STr I, P. 404. On the question of wages under capitalism, reference should be made to R. L. Meek's article `Marx's "Doctrine of increasing Misery" ' (Science and Society, 26, 1 962) where Marx's position is examined with considerable candour. 3 1, P. I76. 1 i,

2

lyjarx's Model of Capitalism

53

jjlage Labour and Capital, for instance, Marx gave the following account of this predicament: One capitalist can drive another from the field and capture his capital only by selling more cheaply. In order to be able to sell more cheaply without ruining himself, he must produce more cheaply ... [and this involves] a more universal introduction and continual improvement of machinery ... other competing capitalists introduce the same machines ... on the same or on a larger scale ... in this way the mode of production and the means of production are continually transformed, revolutionized ... the division of labour is necessarily followed by a greater division of labour, the application of machinery by a still greater application of machinery, work on a large scale by work on a still larger scale. This is the law ... which compels capital to intensify the productive forces of labour ... the law which gives capital no rest and continually whispers in its ear `Go on! Go on!" The presence of exploitation and the absence of socially planned production were two of Marx's most serious complaints against capitalism; but he had many other related criticisms to make. Men, he alleged, had been reduced by capitalist processes to mere appendages of machines, their lives dominated by long and exhausting hours of performing dull, repetitive tasks requiring only minimal skills and bringing wages, but creating no sense of reward or achievement. In fact, the worker's wages constituted the sole meaning which work now had: `Life begins for him where this activity ceases, at the table, in the public house, in bed. The twelve hours' labour on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, drilling, etc., but as earnings, which bring him to the table, to the public house, into bed.12 Moreover, long hours made short lives. Driven to work in the service of private profit and thus afflicted by the minute division of labour (which Marx saw as one of the most lamentable features of capitalism), men, instead of fulfilling themselves psychologically at work, were increasingly brutalized and dismembered by the labour process, while physically, `the forest of uplifted arms ... became ever thicker, while the arms themselves became ever 1

SIVI, PP. 92-3.

2 Jbid.,

p. 77, emphasis in original.

li 1

54

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

thinner'.' They were increasingly miserable. In Capital Marx described the effect upon the worker of modern production: Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital.2 But the hour of deliverance was at hand. ' STV 1, P. 97. Cf. Capital 1, on the declining physical condition of the population: `Experience shows to the intelligent observer with what swiftness and grip the capitalist mode of production, dating, historically speaking, only from yesterday, has seized the vital power of the people by the very root—shows how the degeneration of the industrial population is only retarded by the constant absorption of primitive and physicallyuncorrupted elements from the country—shows how even the country labourers ... are already beginning to die off' (p. 269). 2', P• 645

IV THE MARXIAN THEORY OF THE STATE

Marx gave a clear definition of politics in the Communist Manifesto: `Political power, properly so called', he wrote, `is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another';' and he concluded logically that politics, an activity the cessation of which he anticipated with pleasure, will be abolished in the classless society of the future wherein, as Marx says in the Poverty of Philosophy, `social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions' .2 This is part of what he meant when he talked about the emancipation of the proletariat involving universal emancipation. Politics was, then, a characteristic feature of all but the earliest period of human `pre-history', and, as with other activities, it had as its base the successive modes of production which had been exhibited in society. `The material life of individuals', Marx wrote in the German Ideology, `... their mode of production and form of intercourse ... this is the real basis of the State and remains so at all the stages at which division of labour and private property are still necessary.... These actual relations are in no way created by the State power; on the contrary they are the power creating it.'3 This definition in terms of oppressive force leads to a consideration of what may be called the first of the Marxian theories of the state. It seems that Marx and Engels had two basic theories of the state—the `class instrument' theory and the `independent parasite' theory—and that elements of both of them can be found scattered widely in their works. While these two theories of the state are quite different, they both spring (as `historical materialist' explanations should) from an appraisal of the class situation apparent at different stages of the histories of the nations of Europe. The state arose historically, Engels asserted in the Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, out of irreconcilable class ' STV t, p. 51. It is clear also from Marx's writings that resistance to political oppression, and attempts by an oppressed class to gain control of the state machine, are essentially political in character. 2 P. 197, emphasis in original. 3 P• 357•

56

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

antagonisms, themselves the result of economic developments which brought about the disintegration of primitive communism. The function of the state was to facilitate the exploitation of one class by another and to keep order in society. Although to explain the origins of an institution is not necessarily to account for its contemporary function, most Marxists have taken it as axiomatic that the state is inseparable from the class-divided society and that it acts as an instrument of class oppression. Thus, to give only a recent example, J. Harvey and K. Hood in their book The British State quote William Morris in support of this contention: `The magistrate, the judge, the policeman, and the soldier are the sword and pistol of this modern highwayman, the capitalist.'-' As we have seen, the state was for Marx essentially coercive. It was, he held in the first volume of Capital, `the concentrated and organized force of society'.2 It settles disputes between the classes within a society, but settlement does not mean reconcilation: it means the oppression of the non-ruling classes and the oppression tends to become the more ferocious as the disputes become increasingly acrimonious. The state also, it would seem, tends to become more powerful and to present the appearance of being in some sense apart from society, dominating it.3 This is the case particularly in modern industrial society where the numbers of its employees are greatly increased, the class struggles with which it has to cope are more serious, and the weapons at its disposal prove more lethal.4 In fact Marx makes a distinction (also made by Hegel) between the state and what he calls `civil society', and asserts that in modern times this distinction has tended to correspond increasingly to social reality. In the medieval period, the privileges of the ruling nobility tended to link together the state and civil society, and civil society then possessed what Marx calls `a directly political character' .5 Thus dominant persons '(19 5 8), P. 12. 2 P. 751. 3 Although this point is not clarified in the works of Marx and Engels, it does not seem that this `alienation' of the political institutions of a society has any particular relevance in connection with the second theory of the state (the state as independent parasite) outlined below. 4 In his `Preparatory Writings' for Anti-Duhring (1955), Engels seems to suggest that it would be unwise for revolutionaries to confront `the present militarybureaucratic state' openly at all (p. 485). See also SAV i, p. Ito ff. s `The Jewish Question' in Karl Marx. Early Nritings, P. 28.

The Marxian Theory of the State

57

within civil society were ipso facto dominant persons in politics also, and affairs of state were typically regarded as the private business of the king and the nobility. In modern nations, however, political privileges of this sort have been abolished, and the perfect modern state is said therefore to consist of citizens enjoying equal civil rights. And (in theory at least) the important role which a man played in civil society no longer guaranteed him any political position or influence superior to that of his less important fellows, as had been the case with the feudal lord. The modern `individual', who emerges with the dissolution of feudalism, appeared in two roles: with respect to his function in civil society as bourgeois, shopkeeper, proletarian, etc.; and with respect to his political function as a citizen. Each member of society is accordingly said by Marx to have `his political lion's skin'? Correlatively, politics, being in this sense separated from civil society, has become public, the concern of the generality and not the prerogative of the `natural' leaders of society. However, when important men in civil society lost (as such) their political functions, which entailed some involvement with questions of general concern, their materialistic egotism emerged as the unrestrained force which is now seen exhibited in bourgeois society. Marx reports that `where the political state has attained to its full development, man leads, not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life, a double existence—celestial and terrestrial. He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society where he acts simply as a private individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.'2 The `natural rights', so often proclaimed by modern theorists to be the possession of the individual as such, are really nothing more than the egotistic rights of `bourgeois man', supposed by these theorists to be `natural man'. Since the medieval period, therefore, the state had become distinct from civil society, and in the most advanced countries now presented a more or less bogus appearance of autonomy from civil society.3 Indeed, the illusion had arisen in the works of writers like Thomas Hobbes that civil society (now consisting essentially of egotistic -' Bid., p. 142 Ibid., p. 133 For although the bourgeois was a mere `citizen', still civil society had a deter-

mining effect upon the modern state.

58

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

individual `atoms') was held together by the state—an illusion which Marx was, of course, quick to expose. It is natural necessity [he explained], essential human properties, however alienated they may seem to be, and interest that hold the members of civil society together: civil, not political life is their real tie. It is therefore not the state that holds the atoms of civil society together, but the fact that they are atoms only in imagination, in the heaven of their fancy, but in reality beings tremendously different from atoms, in other words, not divine egoists, but egotistic human beings. Only political superstition today imagines that social life must be held together by the state, whereas in reality the state is held together by civil life.' Marx pursued repeatedly the matter of the separation of modern civil society and the modern state, and this separation was one of the salient themes of Marx's political thought, being especially significant in the context of his discussion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx, then, held that the modern state, while becoming a more and more powerful institution, was at the same time becoming detached from the elements of the life of civil society. The state tended no longer to recognize, for instance, an established religion, or property as a qualification for political participation. It was the individual with his rights who now had significance for the state. But there was, according to Marx, a `contradiction between the democratic representative state and civil society [which] is the perfection of the classic contradiction between public commonwealth and slavedom. In the modern world each one is at the same time a member of slavedom and of the public commonwealth',2 though the slavery which Marx detected was disguised as liberty by modern theories of individualism. He claimed that it had become the task of the modern state to preside over an anarchic civil society in which individuals and classes, freed from the ties and restraints of feudalism, pursued their economic interests substantially unrestrained by governmental action: `Anarchy is the law of civil society emancipated from disjointing privileges, and the anarchy of civil society is the basis of the modern public system, just as the public system is in turn the guarantee of that anarchy.13 This assertion that the state currently guarantees the anarchic cony HF, p. 163. 2 Ibid., p. 157. 3 Ibid., p. 158.

The Marxian Theory of the State

59

dition of civil society brings us back to the notion that the state is an instrument of class oppression, the first of Marx's theories of the state to be explained. It is a theory hinted at in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of z8.¢¢ where Marx says that `every relation of servitude is but a modification and consequence' of the relation of the worker to production.' Political decisions were not, therefore, to be understood as the mere whims of those individuals making them; and in the Communist Manifesto, Marx is found asserting that `the executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie',2 while in the German Ideology he gave some account of how the capitalist class came to achieve control over the political institutions of modern industrial countries: To this modern private property corresponds the modern State, which, purchased gradually by the owners of property by means of taxation, has fallen entirely into their hands through the national debt, and its existence has become wholly dependent on the commercial credit which the owners of property, the bourgeois, extend to it, as reflected in the rise and fall of State funds on the stock exchange .3 Marx suggested that this situation is to be found particularly in America (`the most perfect example of a modern state) ,¢ England and France. This, however, was only a partial account, for Marx made it clear elsewhere that he regarded certain violent revolutions, such as the French Revolution of 1789 and the English Revolution of the 164os, as essentially bourgeois in character. A more general, and somewhat less sophisticated account of the political dominance of the bourgeoisie in modern society was given by Engels in the Principles of Communism where he states that in European constitutional monarchies the suffrage is confined to property owners and that in consequence, deputies and ministers are actually drawn from the ranks of the bourgeoisie.-' Engels stated the theory of political institutions as instruments of class oppression very clearly in a letter written in 1871: `The possessing classes ... keep the working people in servitude not only by the might of their wealth, by the simple exploitation of labour by capital, ' p. 82. 4 Ibid., P. 782 SITE I, P• 35• 3 PP. 77-8. Engels also referred to the direct corruption of officials by wealthy 325• R, 5 Pbourgeois (see SW 11, P. 291).

6o

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

but also by the power of the state—by the army, the bureaucracy; the courts.'- Again, in Engels's Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, the state is declared to be `an organization for the purpose of preventing any interference from without with the existing conditions of production, and; therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production'.2 For a final example, reference may be made to Engels's discussion of The Housing Question in Germany. After designating the Kaiser a servant of the capitalist class, the author asserted that the state is nothing but the organized collective power of the possessing classes, the landowners and the capitalists, as against the exploited classes, the peasants and the workers. What the individual capitalists ... do not want, their state also does not want. If therefore the individual capitalists deplore the housing shortage, but can hardly be persuaded even superficially to palliate its most terrifying consequences, the collective capitalist, the state, will not do much more 3 Much earlier, Marx had drawn similar conclusions about the possibility of social reform, and in one of his earliest essays he alleged that the state could not take any real steps to relieve working-class misery without undermining the conditions of its own existence .4 Indeed, it should be noted in this context that when Marx was still a very young man, holding a neo-Hegelian view of the state, he had observed and criticized the conduct of the Diet of the Rhenish provinces which met at Dusseldorf in 1841. This body had consisted mainly of landowners, and the influence of social class upon legislation had been strongly impressed upon Marx by the way in which the Diet had suppressed (in his view with shameless self-interest) traditional 1 SC,

3 2 Sfpr I,, SITr 1, P. 547• P. 315. p. 138. See his essay `On the King of Prussia and Social Reform', in Karl Marx: 4 Selected Essays (ed. J. H. Stenning). Nevertheless, there are Marxian passages (e.g. Capital 1, p. 299) indicating that useful social reforms (e.g. a statutory limit on the working day) may be the result of the exercise of the growing power of the working class as a whole. As we have seen, however, the emphasis of Marx's work is upon the worsening condition of the working population in capitalist society; and certainly the real importance of these reforms lay for Marx in the struggle to secure their passage, a struggle which would prepare the way for greater things.

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peasant rights of stick gathering in private woods by passing a law which put the collection of dead twigs in the same category as mutilation of the trees themselves.It seemed to Marx and Engels, moreover, that the more powerful the state became the less likely politicians were to grasp that the general explanation of social evils lay in the structure of society itself, of which the state is but the `self-conscious and official expression'.2 Politicians attributed contemporary social maladies to the conduct of their opponents—as did the Whigs and Tories in England—or to administrative faults. However, it seems that in certain circumstances viable reform legislation might be instituted.$ Given these explanations, it is not easy to discover precisely what the characterization of the state as an instrument of class oppression is meant to convey. Perhaps, like the main body of theory called `historical materialism', this particular conception is not intended to convey anything precisely about specific historical situations, but was conceived by Marx and Engels as an analytical tool to guide empirical research. Certainly, when dealing with a concrete set of historical events, Marx and Engels made it plain that it would not do simply to pronounce those slogans to which they, on occasion, confined themselves. In fact, Engels was upon one occasion constrained to remark upon the peculiarity of the capitalists (as compared with previous ruling classes) in that they had as a class experienced so much difficulty in sustaining unequivocally their political domination in modern societies. For in proportion as the bourgeoisie develops its industry, its commerce and its means of communication, it produces the proletariat. And at a certain point ... it begins to notice that this, its proletarian double, is outgrowing it. From that moment on, it loses the strength required for exclusive political rule; it looks round for allies, with whom to share its rule, or to whom it cedes the whole of its rule, as circumstances may require4 And generally, one of the themes of the Marxian analysis of European - See H. P. Adams, Karl Marx in his Early Writings (Frank Cass, 1965), pp. 63-5; and F. Mehring, Karl Marx: the story of his life (Bodley Head, 1936), PP. 39-432 `On the King of Prussia and Social Reform', op. cit., p. 119. 3 See below, p. 61, and p. 6o, n. 4, above. 4 SWr1, p. 583.

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

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politics was the difficulty experienced by the bourgeois class in securing their objectives. Marx's account of French history indicated, for example, that the ruling class could be deeply divided into factions during particular periods. Discussing France after the overthrow of Napoleon, Marx commented that the bourgeois mass was, however, royalist. One section of it, the large landowners, had ruled during the Restoration and was accordingly Legitimist. The other, the aristocrats of finance and big industrialists, had ruled during the July Monarchy and was consequently Orleanist. The high dignitaries of the army, the university, the church, the bar, the academy and of the press were to be found on either side, though in various proportions? In Class Struggles in France, Marx deals more explicitly with this matter of control of the state by only a faction of what he would otherwise have described as `the ruling class': It was not the French bourgeoisie that ruled under Louis Philippe, but one faction of it: bankers, stock exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and iron mines and forests, a part of the landed proprietors associated with them—the so-called finance aristocracy. It sat on the throne, it dictated laws in the Chambers, it distributed public offices, from cabinet portfolios to tobacco bureau posts.2 Furthermore, from Marx's own account, given a little later in the same work, it appears that those whom he called significantly `the non-ruling factions of the French bourgeoisie' were far from being satisfied with the rule of the finance aristocracy: The July monarchy was nothing other than a joint-stock company for the exploitation of France's national wealth, the dividends of which were divided among ministers, Chambers, 24o,000 voters and their adherents. Louis Philippe was the director of this company.... Trade, industry, agriculture, shipping, the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie, were bound to be continually endangered and prejudiced under this system. Cheap government ... was what it had inscribed in the July days on its banner.3 1

SW 1, P. 240.

2 Ibid., pp. 128-9.

3 Ibid., pp. 130-1.

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63

In his exposition of British history during roughly the same period, Marx made somewhat similar points. The reason for the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, one learns from his lecture On the Question of Free Trade, delivered in January 1848, was the desire of the industrial capitalists to undermine the position of the landowners whom he called `the last remaining remnants of feudalism'; and for this purpose the capitalist spent large amounts of money securing proletarian support. In revenge, the landowners, already stricken by the first Reform Act, made common cause with the proletariat to secure the passage of the Ten Hours' Bill which was designed to reduce the profits of manufacturers. And this was the hypothesis whereby Marx explained the leading part played by the `so-called philanthropic Lords" such as Lord Ashley in the ten hours' agitation. It seems also that the ambivalence of the class relationships in English politics extends back at least as far as 1688. During and after the Glorious Revolution the Whigs, who were, said Marx, `the oldest, richest, and most arrogant portion of English landed property', maintained an alliance with various sections of the rising bourgeoisie. At first this section was the `Bankocracy'; then after 1846 the Whigs are found linked to the `Millocracy', who were admitted to the political pale after the first Reform Act. Thus the Whigs were to be distinguished from the Tories because they were `the aristocratic representatives of the bourgeoisie',2 conforming to bourgeois interests and instituting bourgeois legislation, and being apparently concerned only with maintaining their own oligarchical dominance in political positions. It is not surprising to find Marx describing the British Constitution as `a compromise between the class that rule officially and the class that rule non-offiicially'.3 And this compromise still continued after the decisive victory of 1846 had apparently opened the way for the complete takeover of political power by the bourgeoisie because the bourgeoisie were alarmed by the menace of the proletariat in the face of which they preferred to sustain their existing association with the Whigs. In a similar vein, Marx assured his readers in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and in his article in the New York Daily Tribune of 1 See `Parliamentary Debates' in K. Marx and F. Engels On Britain (1962), P. 368. On the Question of Free Trade is printed together with PP. 2 On Britain, p. 35 5 3 Ibid., p. 423.

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Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

August 1852' that those who represented a class politically may very often not in fact be of that class. All that is usually necessary is that the representatives should, through limited political vision, share the ideas of the class for which they act. Moreover, Marx's pronouncements on French politics during the presidency of Louis Napoleon indicated that the political representatives of a class may become estranged from that class: `The party of Order in parliament had fallen out with the party of Order outside parliament. The spokesmen and scribes of the bourgeoisie, its platform and its press, in short, the ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie itself, the representatives and the represented, faced one another in estrangement and no longer understood oneanother.'2 It is in terms of this estrangement that Marx accounts for the decline of the Party of Order vis-á-vis Bonaparte, for the Party was repudiated by the bourgeoisie whose sole concern, according to Marx, was with the making of profits: The aristocracy of finance, therefore, condemned the parliamentary struggle of the party of Order with the executive power as a disturbance of order, and celebrated every victory of the President over its ostensible representatives as a victory of order.... The industrial bourgeoisie, too, in its fanaticism for order, was angered by the squabbles of the parliamentary party of Order with the executive power.... It [the bourgeoisie] proved that the struggle to maintain its public interests, its own class interests, its political power, only troubled and upset it, as it was a disturbance of private business.3 The bourgeoisie, stated Marx, `declared unequivocally that it longed, to get rid of its own political rule in order to get rid of the troubles and dangers of ruling',4 even going so far as to punish its own journalists and men of letters who defended in print its political interests.5 This discussion leads to an examination of Marx's other main theory of the state the theory of the state as a parasite on the whole of society. Marx's fundamental contention in this context was that in a situation where the two foremost classes within society were of more or less equal strength, and therefore act as a balance to each other, the state might succeed in establishing a considerable degree of independence. "The Elections in England—Tories and Whigs', reprinted in On Britain. 5 See ibid., P. ago. 3 Ibid., pp. 288-9. 4 Ibid., p. 29o.

2 SW 1, p. 2&7.

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This conception appeared clearly in an article written by Marx in 1847 for the Deutscher-Brüsseler Zeitung. Here Marx asserted that the state was always a reflection of civil society and that it was therefore a mistake to attribute significant creative powers to the state (`the apple does not make the apple tree').' However, during the period of absolute monarchy, which was only just coming to an end in Germany, the state had assumed a certain independence. `Modern historical research,' Marx wrote, `has shown how modern absolute monarchy appeared in the period of transition, when the old feudal classes were decaying and the medieval burgher class was evolving into the modern bourgeois class, without either of the disputing parties being able to settle accounts with the other.12 The German Ideology also contained a reference to the conception of the independent state .3 In a well-known passage in the Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels brought out this notion of the state gaining independence of society in a situation of class balance. After outlining the `class instrument' theory of the state, he adds: By way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power, as ostensible mediator, acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both. Such was the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which held the balance between the nobility and the class of burghers; such was the Bonapartism of the First, and still more of the Second French Empire, which played off the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The latest performance of this kind ... is the new German Empire of the Bismarck nation: here the capitalists and workers are balanced against each other and equally cheated for the benefit of the impoverished Prussian cabbage junkers 4 1 `Moralizing criticism and critical morality: a polemic against Karl Heinzen', in Selected Essays (ed. J. H. Stenning), p. 148. 2 Ibid" PP. 148-9. 3 P. 78, where it is suggested that in nations where `no one section of the population can achieve dominance over the others', the state would become independent, that is, something other than `the form of organization which the ruling class necessarily adopt for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests'. 4 SW 11, p. 29o. In 1849 Engels also used the concept of class balance to explain the political dominance of Metternich in Austria-Hungary, though he also adds a racial element. See Engels's essay `Hungary and Panslavism' in RM, pp. 58-9.

Interpretation of'the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

66

Now Sherman M. Chang, the author of the only extended work specifically concerned with Marx's theory of the state, in fact cites this passage,, but accepting, as do most of the other commentators, Engels's assurance that such a situation is exceptional, does not feel any necessity to deviate from his contention that the Marxian theory of the state is fundamentally one of class domination. Marx went into considerable detail in his description of the government of Louis Napoleon which was, he asserted in Civil Isar in France, the `only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation'.2 He refers to the `state power, apparently soaring high above society' ,3 and, while denying that Louis Napoleon was the representative of any class in the sense that the politicians of the July Monarchy were the representatives of a class, Marx states that he (Louis) relied upon the support, especially the electoral support, of the small-holding peasants. The peasants, not constituting a class `for itself' ,4 could not promote their own class interests and had consequently to find a politician who, they hoped, would represent their interests. But in their representative they, and the rest of French society, found a master.5 Marx thus lamented that France seemed to have escaped from the despotism of a class only to fall under the despotism of an individual. In helping to support the régime of Napoleon III, the small-holding peasants of France were, in Marx's view, playing the usual reactionary part which was to be expected of them in modern times. Marx indeed found it almost impossible to believe that they could contribute anything progressive to the development of modern society. They con1 The

Marxian Theory of the State (University of Pennslyvania, 1931), P- 53•

2 SIV I, P- 470. 3 Ibid.

4 This distinction which Marx made between a class in the sense simply of a number of people similarly related to the means of production and a class `for itself'—a number of people similarly related to the means of production and in addition conscious of their common class position, class interests, and common class enemies, and willing to act upon that consciousness—is central to Marx's position with respect to politics. See below, pp. 81-6. 5 Cf. Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, where Engels said that the state `which in all typical periods is exclusively the state of the ruling class ... in all cases remains essentially a machine for keeping down the oppressed, exploited class' (SVII) P. 294).

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stituted a class which was essentially a survival from a previous era and which was consequently doomed to extinction by being absorbed into the proletariat. Clinging to his small plot of land, which he mistakenly, imagined he owned, and stubbornly refusing to recognize his kinship with the urban proletariat, the peasant was almost of necessity a reactionary immersed in what Marx called `the idiocy of rural life',2 `the most decided enemy of all social progress' 3 There are references in Marx's writings (for example, the first edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) which indicate the possibility that the peasants, while being unable to take the initiative in revolutionary action, might yet act as a `chorus' for the proletarian uprising. But the peasants never did anything to justify these hopes, and the burden of Marx's treatment of them was that they were to be regarded as hostile to social progress generally and to socialism in particular. The independence on the part of the state, dramatically embodied in the person of such individuals as Napoleon, Bismarck and Napoleon III, was the phenomenon which Marx and Engels called `Bonapartism'. And in explaining this phenomenon, as it appeared in the nineteenth century at least, Engels referred not only to a situation of class balance, but also to the peculiar spineless character of the bourgeoisie as compared with previous ruling classes. Bonapartism, Engels suggested in a letter to Marx written in April 1866 in which Bismarck's political activities were discussed, was really the religion of the bourgeoisie, a class which, not having `the stuff in it for ruling directly itself', tended increasingly to allow a semi-dictator to rule formally, even though he was compelled `to adopt [the] material interests of the bourgeoisie as [his] own' .4 Returning to the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, we may note that here Marx undertook to show how `the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible 1 Marx used the concept of `nominal' or `phantom' ownership to signify the irrationality of the peasant in seeking to retain at all costs his small plot. The real owners of the peasants' land Marx identified as the lawyer, the usurer, and the state as tax gatherer. For the definitive treatment of Marx's view of the peasants, see H. Mayer `Marx, Engels and the politics of the peasantry' (Etudes de Marxologie, no. 3, June 1960). 2 SIV 1, P- 37• 3 `The nationalization of land' (1869), quoted by Mayer, op. cit., p. 129. 4 SC, P. 214. ME-P

68

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part',' and he points to the half-million government servants who had a vested interest in maintaining the power of the state.2 Each successive revolution in French history had had the effect of contributing to the perfection of the state machine because the classes contending for its domination regarded its possession as one of the principal spoils of victory; and now, under Louis Bonaparte, the state had become an independent parasite: This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its ingenious state machinery, embracing wide strata, with a host of officials numbering half a million ... this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system, which it helped to hasten.3 Although Louis Napoleon usually acted in such a way as not to infringe the material interests of the bourgeoisie, Marx made it quite plain that he (Louis) thought of himself as the representative of all Frenchmen—a veritable father of the people—and that he had succeeded in breaking the political power of the bourgeoisie .4 On the other hand, the bourgeoisie were constrained to support him in his efforts to become first President, and then Emperor: `Only the chief of the Society of December zoth can still save bourgeois society! Only theft can still save property; only perjury, religion; bastardy, the family; disorder, order!'5 ' S IF I, P. 222. 2 On this point of government officials developing an interest apart from that of the class of their origin, mention should be made of Engels's reference in a wellknown article on 'Russia and the Social Revolution', written in 1873, to the large army of Russian bureaucrats which 'robs the country and forms a real class' (RM, p. 208, emphasis added). 3 SIVI, p. 301. 4 See ibid., p. 3o8. 5 Ibid. In the Holy Family Marx claimed that Napoleon I recognized that 'the unhampered development of bourgeois society' was 'the essence of the modern state' and that he consequently decided to protect that basis. However, Marx indicated also that Napoleon was, temporarily at least, master of the situation: 'He ... regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer and his subordinate which must have no will of its own ... He fed the egotism of French nationalism to complete satiety but demanded the sacrifice of bourgeois business, delights, wealth, etc., as often as it was expedient to the political aim of conquest' (p. 166).

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Whatever form the state took, it was clearly an increasingly powerful institution, and the proletariat, in making their revolution, would have to contend with it. In the latter part of his life, Marx was convinced that the state machine, as it was known then, would have to be destroyed by the working class and their own rule established in its place. Earlier in their careers, Marx and Engels, their thinking to some extent dominated by the example of the French Revolution of 1789, had anticipated a seizure by the revolutionary proletarians of the existing state machine and believed that political centralization would assist revolutionary progress. At this period, therefore, moves towards decentralization met with their disapproval, and in his Address to the Communist League of 185o, Marx warned that 'as in France in 1793 so today in Germany it is the task of the really revolutionary party to carry through the strictest centralization'.' However, while subsequently recognizing the necessity of completely smashing the state machine, Marx and Engels were equally clear that what they called the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would still be characterized by class oppression, and Engels went so far as to dismiss as absurd all talk of the state as a guarantor of liberty: oppression had been its function and would remain so while it continued to exist: As ... the state is only a transitional institution which is used ... to hold down one's adversaries by force, it is pure nonsense to talk of a free people's state: so long as the proletariat still uses the state, it does not use it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist.2 Marx nevertheless seems to suggest that the aspirations of bourgeois democracy would become a reality for the vast majority of people after the revolution, but organized force would still be necessary to eliminate the remnants of the bourgeoisie and other reactionary elements. However, whereas the state in previous forms of society had always oppressed the great majority of the people, the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would act oppressively only with respect to a small and diminishing minority. Thus Marx is able to write in the Critique of the Gotha Programme of the impending conversion of the state 'from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to 1 SW 1, P. 107. 2 SC, P. 357•

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

70

it',' an organ from which (it is clear from the Communist Manifesto' s programme for `the proletariat organized as the ruling class')I he anticipated many acts of liberation as well as of oppression. It has been widely noted that, in view of the importance of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a key Marxian concept, Marx himself said little about it directly, with the result that his view of its nature has for the most part to be pieced together from the somewhat dubious source of Civil War in France, a work with an unusually high propaganda content. In the Communist Manifesto there is a reference to `the proletariat organized as the ruling class',3 and Marx referred to the notion again in 1852 in his famous letter to Weydemeyer, saying that it was his (Marx's) distinction to prove that the class struggle led necessarily to the dictatorship of the proletariat.4 However, his most celebrated pronouncement on this subject comes in the Critique of the Gotha Programme in which he wrote that `between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.'5 Perhaps Marx's description of the Paris Commune, though largely written for propaganda purposes (he was far from enthusiastic about the activities of the Communards, and wrote in the knowledge that most of them were not communists) gives the best indication of his views on the political aspects of the post-proletarian revolutionary society. Engels, at least, flatly asserted that the Commune was an example of the dictatorship of the proletariats and Marx himself, while not endorsing this view, called it `the glorious harbinger of a new society' ,7 claiming inter alia that it was `a working class government',7 and that its members had `aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators'? In his 1881 Introduction to Marx's pamphlet Civil War in France (in which the history of the Commune was recounted), Engels emphasized how important the matter of dealing with the state had become for revolutionary proletarians, and he assessed the situation 1 S W 11, P. 29.

2 SW I, p. 5o. For an account of this programme, see below, pp. 102-34 SC, p. 86. 5 S W II, P. 303 SW I, p. 50. 6 See his Introduction (1891) to Civil War in France, SW I, P. 440. 7 Ibid., P. 49 1•

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confronting the Communards in terms suggestive of a third Marxian theory of the state: What had been the characteristic attribute of the former state? Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests, originally, through simple division of labour. But these organs, at whose head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from servants of society into the masters of society.' Marx, in the body of the work, further asserted that `over-mightiness' was now an inevitable tendency in states, and that during the Commune period special measures were taken to obviate this tendency with respect to the new proletarian state. First, there were the devices that might be called those of `extreme democracy'. That is, all official posts, including the judiciary, were filled on the basis of election by universal suffrage and the incumbents were subject to popular recall at any time. Secondly, the pay of officials was made similar to that of workmen: this rule was said to have stopped place-hunting and careerism. Further, the standing army, which had always been a prop of state power, was abolished and replaced by the armed people. The police force was said to have been `stripped of its political attributes',2 and steps were also taken to weaken what Marx called `parson power'. Government, in short, was `restored to the responsible agents of society' 3 In sketching what might have been the internal development of France had the Paris Commune survived, Marx outlined a guasifederal structure, and referred to `united cooperative societies [which] are to regulate national production upon a common plan' 4 Interestingly, Marx stated in the Critique of the Gotha Programme and elsewhere that 1 SW I, P. 438; Engels's assertions almost certainly refer to what Marx called `oriental despotism', a form of government presiding over scattered, primitive communities and owning the land which was worked by these communities. `The despot', Marx wrote, `here appears as the father of all the numerous lesser communities thus realizing the common unity of all' (Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, ed. E. J. Hobsbawm (1964), p. 69). And he will be responsible for providing certain essential social services; thus `the communal conditions for real appropriation through labour, such as irrigation systems (very important among the Asian peoples), means of communication, etc., and will then appear as the work of the higher unity—the despotic government which is poised above the lesser communities' (ibid.). Engels returned to this subject in -4nti-Duhring (p. 2o5). 3 Ibid., P. 472• 2 SW I, P. 471. 4 SW I, P. 474•

72

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

The Marxian Theory of the State

73

post-proletarian revolutionary society will be characterized by what might be termed `public decisions' which would have some sort of national application (specifically, part of the social product would have to be withheld from members of society in order to provide for a renewal and expansion of the means of production, health and education services, etc.), and he seems to imply that this would be the case even in the absence of the state as a central enforcing agency, for the state will in due course cease to exist.' Marx professed to see in the Commune a revolt against the state as such, and he described it as being `superseded', destroyed as a separate institution by having its functions reabsorbed by society. In his preparatory notes for Civil War in France, Marx revealed the full depth of his contempt for the modern state, denouncing it as `covered by infamy from top to bottom'.2 He thus rejoiced (at least in retrospect) when it was crushed by the Communards, who thereby gave a clear indication of the manner in which the victorious proletariat of the future would proceed. Marx was anxious to distinguish the Commune (and by implication the future dictatorship of the proletariat) from all previous existing forms of government. Without exception they had been despotical, while the effect of the Commune's actions would have liberated men from the tyranny of capitalism. The Commune was, Marx alleged, `a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive.... It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle ... against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.' 3 In particular, the Commune was not to be confused with a liberal parliamentary régime, for `instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament',4 the Parisians would have been able, by the introduction of universal suffrage and by the device of the recall, to ensure that their new government exactly reflected their wishes. Universal suffrage was to serve them `as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the

workmen and managers in his business. And it is well known that companies, like individuals ... generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly.'' The Commune was therefore said by Marx to have been a unique phenomenon, `a government of the people by the people',2 with its public servants being `elective, responsible, and revocable' .3 Perhaps the most significant thing to note about the Marxian conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat is that it is to be distinguished from the notion of the dictatorship (albeit in the name of the proletariat) of a small, politically conscious élite, who formerly constituted a conspiratorial political party, and who were to come to power by means of a putsch. This notion was associated by Marx and Engels primarily with August Blanqui, a devoted revolutionary whose ardour they admired, but from whom they differed on this matter of how the just society was to be brought about. To Marx and Engels, Blanqui's 4putschism', with its implication of post-revolutionary rule by a small minority, was a dangerous delusion, and they took care on a number of occasions to juxtapose their own conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat with Blanqui's preferred solution of what might be called `the political problem'. Thus Engels, writing in 1874, commented critically upon Blanqui's assumption `that any revolution may be made by the outbreak of a small revolutionary minority', for from this assumption `follows ... the necessity of a dictatorship after the success of the venture. This is, of course, not a dictatorship of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small minority that has made the revolution, and who are themselves previously organized under the dictatorship of one or several individuals.' 4 The conclusion of this chapter is that the evidence is against the possibility of discussing the Marxian conception of the state purely in terms of class oppression. The Communist Manifesto did so—but then it was only a manifesto. It seems that when Marx and Engels found themselves confronted with a specific set of historical circumstances the categories of the Manifesto were not sufficient to their purposes. The state, they found, was very often striving to make itself independent of the classes within a society, and could in certain circum-

' See also below, pp. roi-5. Quoted by R. Miliband, `Marx and the state', in The Socialist Register, t965 (Merlin Press, 1965), p. 296. 3 SW 1, P. 4734 Ibid., p. 47 2.

31bid., P. 471• 21bid., P. 478• `Programme of the Blanquist fugitives from the Paris Commune', printed together with Marx's Civil War in France (Kerr, 1934), P- 135•

2

' Ibid. 4

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Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

stances go a long way towards establishing such independence. As has been seen, Engels regarded this as an exceptional situation, but the historical examples which he and Marx furnish make the concept of the state as a parasite on the whole of society one of considerable theoretical importance. Marx also found complicated the question of which section of the population could enforce its will on society by political means. The so-called `ruling class' could itself be deeply divided, and some sections of it could be oppressed by the political activities of other sections. Further, some political representatives of a class need not be members of that class, and a class might wish to repudiate its political representatives even while the latter were striving to further its interests. Finally, politicians would sometimes feel the temptation to act in pursuance of their own interests as distinct from the interests of the class they ostensibly represented. It seems, in dealing with modern times at least, that only at infrequent intervals did Marx and Engels find it possible to describe the state purely in terms of oppression by a homogeneous ruling class.

V PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION

There was a sense in which the revolutionary proletariat were no different from the revolutionary classes of the past, for developments in the mode of production were placing in their hands the levers of economic and political power just as, on previous occasions, these levers had been grasped by the revolutionary bourgeoisie who had thus been able to overthrow the feudal aristocracy as the ruling class. Marx used the term `revolution' to designate two different conceptions concerned with the overthrow of one ruling class and its replacement by another. In his `sociology of revolution' the economic supersession of the ruling class preceded their political supersession (though the rising class, having made themselves politically dominant, will use the agency of the state finally to crush their opponents), and he described both these developments as revolutions. In fact, both he and Engels distinguished between `social power' and `political power'? Thus in an article written in 1877 Engels, in making this distinction, suggested that although the bourgeoisie acquired `social power' in the countries of Western Europe it took them a further period to acquire `political power': From the middle 'of the fifteenth century onwards, the bourgeoisie acquired a far more extensive sphere of trade and therewith a new spur for its industry; and in the most important branches, handicrafts were supplanted by manufacture, now on a factory scale, and this again was supplanted by large scale industry, become possible owing to the discoveries of the previous century, especially that of the steam engine ... thus the bourgeoisie came more and more to combine social wealth and social power in its hands, while it still for a long period remained excluded from political power, which was in the hands of the nobility and the monarchy supported by the nobility.z 1 For this distinction in Marx, see The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, SWI, p. 261. 2 SIV II, pp. 149-50.

76

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

There is, then, a period wherein the economic `base' of society and the political element of its `superstructure' are out of alignment, with the old ruling class clinging to political power when the economic basis of that power (`social power' in the nomenclature of Marx and Engels) had crumbled away. In the German Ideology Marx put the matter thus: `An earlier interest, the peculiar form of intercourse of which has already been ousted by that belonging to a later interest, remains for a long time afterwards in possession of a traditional power in the illusory community (state, law) ... a power which in the last resort can only be broken by a revolution.', Ultimately, however, the holders of economic power would assert themselves and seize political power also, as did the English bourgeoisie in 1648 and their French counterparts in 1789. It follows that the events of 1648 and 1789 were not mere political revolutions: indeed, they represented nothing less than the final triumph of one form of society over another. Thus Marx informed readers of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung that the revolutions of 1648 and 1789 were not English and French revolutions; they were revolutions of a European pattern ... they were the proclamation of political order for the new European society. The bourgeoisie was victorious in these revolutions; but the victory of the bourgeoisie was at the same time the victory of a new order of society, the victory of bourgeois property over feudal property, of nationality over provincialism, of competition over the guild, of partition over primogeniture, of the owner of land over the domination of the owner by the land, of enlightenment over superstition, of the family over the family name, of industry over heroic laziness, of civil law over medieval privilege.2 Similarly, Marx exposed what he took to be the superficiality of Guizot's treatment of the English Revolution. In Guizot's opinion, Marx comments, the only issues involved in the whole struggle between Charles I and Parliament were purely political prerogatives. Not a word about the reason why Parliament and the class represented in it needed these prerogatives. He has just as little to say about Charles I's , p. 89, emphasis added.

2 SW I, pp. 63-4-

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77

direct interference in free competition, which made England's trade and industry more and more impossible; or about his dependence on Parliament, which because of his constant financial straits became the greater the more he sought to defy Parliament., And the consequence of Guizot's lack of penetration is that `the only explanation he can find for the whole revolution is the malevolence and religious fanaticism of individual troublemakers'.2 The Marxian position appears to be therefore that political revolutions are necessary, and indeed unavoidable, for a rising class; but that the way for the success of such revolutions is always prepared by the disintegration of the economic position (`social power') of the previous ruling class. It may be said, consequently, that the members of a declining class are `decapitated' economically before they are `decapitated' politically. Engels reported that as soon as the bourgeoisie had destroyed the social power of the aristocrats and guild burgesses, it proceeded to annihilate their political power as well. Having become the leading class in the social order, the bourgeoisie now rose to become the leading class in the political world likewise. This was brought about by the introduction of the representative system of government which rests upon the bourgeois doctrine of equality before the law and the legal recognition of free competition 3 Thus, according to Marx's version of English history, `the repeal of the Corn Laws of 1846 merely recognized an already accomplished fact, a change long since enacted in the elements of British civil society, viT., the subordination of the landed interest under the moneyed interest, of property under commerce, of agriculture under manufacturing industry, of the country under the city.'4 Similarly, Marx told his readers that capitalism had developed in such a way as to undermine the position of the capitalists themselves: in fact they have almost been made redundant so far as vital economic processes are concerned. `The capitalist mode of production', he writes "A review of Guizot's book "Why has the English Revolution been successful?"', On Britain, p. 347• 2 Ibid. 3 Principles of Communism, R, P. 325• 4 `The elections in England—Tories and Whigs' (On Britain, op. cit., P. 353)•

78

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

in Capital, `has brought matters to a point where the work of supervision, entirely divorced from the ownership of capital, is always readily obtainable. It has, therefore, come to be useless for the capitalist to perform it himself., And Marx illustrated this contention by the use of an analogy: `An orchestra conductor need not own the instruments of his orchestra, nor is it within the scope of his duties as conductor to have anything to do with the wages of the other musicians.'2 The capitalist, though beset with worries about staying in business, could confine himself to the appropriation of the profit which arises from socialized production, leaving the work of supervision to an increasingly numerous category of managers. Furthermore, the appearance of cooperative factories run by the workers gave Marx additional evidence that the existence of capital and labour was by no means an inevitable feature of modern industrial production. These factories, he explained in Capital, `represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce ... in their actual organization all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist.'3 In fact the main significance for Marx of these social experiments in cooperation was that, by demonstrating the dispensability of capitalists, they indicated to mankind the possibility of a new form of society. He wrote of the cooperators in 1864:

By deed, instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit the means of labour need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart 4 Nonetheless, Marx warned that undue concentration upon these limited experiments (the extension of which would in any event surely be prevented by the use of the political power of the ruling class) should ' Hl,

p. 379•

1 Ibid.

3 Ibid., P. 431 .

4 SIV 1, P. 347•

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Proletarian Revolution

not cause the workers to neglect their real task of the seizure of political power. Moreover, the bourgeoisie, in sustaining the capitalist relations of production (centring upon the pursuit of private profit, and contractual obligation), come to act as what Marx and Engels frequently call a `fetter' upon the forces of production; and historically, a situation in which the relations of production and the forces of production came into conflict always culminated in revolution which destroyed the former. In the Communist Manifesto, an account was given of how in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries `the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.', The outcome was the political domination of the bourgeois class. The point here is that by retaining obsolete relations of production (and the political domination of the corresponding class in society) men would have been denying themselves a degree of control over nature, and this they could never do: `On the contrary,' Marx declared in 1846, `in order that they may not be deprived of ... the fruits of civilization, they are obliged, from the moment when their mode of carrying on commerce no longer corresponds to the productive forces acquired, to change all their traditional social forms.12 Therefore the privileges, the institutions of guilds and corporations, the regulatory régime of the Middle Ages, were social relations that alone corresponded to the acquired productive forces and to the social conditions which had previously existed and from which these institutions had arisen. Under the protection of the régime of corporations and regulations, capital was accumulated, overseas trade was developed, colonies were founded. But the fruits of this men would have forfeited if they had tried to retain the forms under whose shelter these fruits had ripened. Hence burst two thunderclaps—the Revolutions of 164o and 1688.3 It was Marx's contention that a similar conflict between the forces and relations of production was in train in contemporary Europe, and just as previously the feudal régime had been superseded, so the 1 Ibid.,

P• 37-

2 SC, P. 41•

3Ibid.

8o

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

capitalist régime would be displaced. In a celebrated passage in Capital, he puts the matter thus: The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is bust asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated 1 How, then, did this conflict between the forces of production and the relations of production in the later stages of capitalist development manifest itself before the actual political revolution? As the writer understands Marx, this conflict referred firstly to the existence of an `industrial reserve army' of unemployed and to the recurrent and ever more severe economic crises which beset capitalist society. During these crises (which in a sense merely dramatized the inevitable chronic state of underemployment in capitalist society), many factories closed down and the workers concerned were laid off for an indeterminate period. But the shut-down occurred precisely because of the fact that in capitalist society production was not undertaken as a response to human needs as such, but rather it was undertaken at the behest of an estimate of private profit. When the capitalist, being almost wholly concerned with profit, was unable to see the prospect of any in a particular line of production, he put a stop to it. Within the context of capitalist production this was a `rational' decision; and in the short run such decisions enabled the capitalist as a class to surmount the recurring crises. But in the longer run, a dire fate awaited the bourgeois system. In the Principles of Communism Engels gave a very clear account of how the relations of production `fetter' the forces of production, and of how the latter must overcome the former. Large-scale industry [he writes], so long as it is conducted as at present, can only recover its prosperity through a seven-yearly upheaval which is a menace to civilization, not merely casting the proletariat into a well of misery but likewise causing the ruin of a great number of bourgeois. Either large-scale industry must be 1i, P•

763•

81

Proletarian Revolution

abolished, which is quite out of the question, or it needs a totally different social order wherein to function. The new social order would no longer tolerate individual factory owners competing one against the other, but would inaugurate industrial production as an affair run by the whole society according to a settled plan and according to the needs of all the members of society.' It is this sort of reasoning which was surely in part the basis for Marx's assertion in the Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie were no longer fit to be the ruling class because their régime had the effect of turning so many members of society into slaves and paupers.2 Secondly, Marx also held that. the increasingly minute division of labour in the capitalist system restrains the creative capacities of the individual by restricting him to the repetitious performance of a single task, transforming him thereby into what Marx calls `a part of a detailmachine' .3 But this more or less permanent stultifying confinement of the labourer to a `detail function14 in the capitalist process was not the inevitable consequence of mechanized production, though this was in fact the consequence of such production under capitalism. On the contrary, Marx explains that modern industry `by its very nature ... necessitates the variation of labour, fluency of function, universal mobility of labour' ,5 and that this will in reality be the situation in a communist society where machines will be used properly.6 But at the time when Marx was writing, capitalism, which was a system which used machines wrongly, merely `reproduce[d] the old division of labour with its ossified particularizations',7 which in turn made inevitable the unemployment of workers whose `detail function' had been rendered superfluous by those constant technological changes which were such a prominent feature of capitalist society. A further resemblance between the forthcoming proletarian revolution and other class revolutions was that it would be made by what Marx called `a class for itself'. He distinguished in several places between what might be called a class `in itself' and a class `for itself', and although his terminology is not always the same, the two conceptions ' R, P. 327. 5 Ibid.

2 See SIV i, P. 43.

3 Capital i, P. 422.

4 Ibid., P. 487-

6 For this distinction between the proper and improper use of machinery, see also below, pp. io5-6. 7 Capital i, p. 487•

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

82

would seem to be sufficiently clear. We have seen already that Marx defined class basically in terms of relationship to the means of production, but he also insisted on differentiating between a class `in itself' (simply a number of people similarly related to the means of production) and a class `for itself' (a number of people similarly related to the means of production and in addition conscious of their common class position, class interests, and class enemies, and willing to act upon that consciousness. Now this distinction seems to be central to the Marxian theory of politics, but it has not hitherto always been given the attention it deserves in expositions of Marxism.' Marx brought out this distinction between these two conceptions when discussing in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte the position of the small-holding peasantry of France, the class which formed the basis of the political power of Napoleon III: `In so far', he writes, `as there is merely a local interconnection among these smallholding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own name.12 Marx, it would appear, believed that at least some social classes severally made a natural progression from being a class `in itself' (like the French peasants) to being a class `for itself'. The members of a class `in itself' engaged in only localized conflicts against their oppressors, usually of a purely economic nature. But as the members of a class became conscious of their position and possible achievements, they tended to act politically as a national force. In a letter to Bolte written in i 87o Marx specifically distinguished an economic movement from a political movement, stressing that the latter was characterized by the generality of the class objectives sought: The attempt in a particular factory or even in a particular trade to force a shorter working day out of individual capitalists by strikes, etc., is a purely economic movement. On the other hand, the movement to force through an eight-hour, etc., law, is a political movement ... that is to say, a movement of the class, with the 1 But see S. M. Lipset and R. Bendix `Karl Marx's Theory of Social Classes' in S. M. Lipset and R. Bendix, eds., Class, Status and Power (Glencoe: Free Press, 1953); and R. H. Dahrendorf Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Routledge, 1959), Ch. i.

2 S[V I, p. 303.

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83

object of enforcing its interests in a general form, in a form possessing general, socially coercive force.' It appeared, then, that localized economic movements were the most that a class `in itself' could aspire to, whereas political movements were the characteristic of a class `for itself'. Indeed, when Marx, at the end of The Poverty of Philosophy, was outlining the development of the proletariat into a class `for itself', he suggested that this is essentially a political concept: In this struggle—a veritable civil war—all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character. Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass [i.e. the proletariat] a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet [a class] for itself. In the struggle ... this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of a class against a class is a political struggle.2 Since it was Marx's aim to promote a political revolution through which the power of the bourgeoisie would be broken by the proletariat, he attached only secondary importance to strikes and other agitations of an economic nature. Such activities might achieve some temporary improvement in the condition of the workers concerned, or temporarily halt the decline in their position, but the real significance of these activities in the Marxian scheme was that they prepared the way for more generalized action of a political nature, action which would reach its climax in the abolition of the capitalist system as such. Thus Marx warned the workers not to become `exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights increasingly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital';3 they must be aware that their real task was not to improve their wages, but to abolish the whole 1 SC, p. 328.

2 p. 195. See also ibid., p. 140, for a similar passage concerning the manner in

which the proletariat comes to be a class `for itself'. 3

SW' 1) p. 405. ME-G

84

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

wages system. Competition for employment tended to impede progress towards working class solidarity, but eventually this competition would be overcome and the proletariat would be organized, in effect, as a political party: `This constitution of the proletariat into a political party is indispensable to ensure the triumph of the Social Revolution and of its ultimate goal: the abolition of classes." It was the contention of Marx and Engels that the economic processes to which the proletariat were subject under capitalism would inevitably transform its members into a class `for itself'; of this there could be no doubt. The question [wrote Marx in 18451 is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of the proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action ... [are] irrevocably and obviously demonstrated in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today ... [A] large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity.12 The factors inducing the emergence of the proletariat as a political striking force are not far to seek, for they were clearly set out in both the Communist Manifesto and in the Principles of Communism. Reference was made to the ever deepening struggle over the distribution of economic benefits in capitalist society, and the accompanying tendency for men to be dehumanized and reduced to mere appendages of machines by the remorseless division of labour; to the herding together of men into factories; to the easy communication of subversive ideas in modern society; and finally to the establishment of revolutionary political organizations. And the contribution of Marx and Engels to the development of a proletariat conscious of their historic mission was directed towards the spread of socialism as a system of ideas and the foundation of revolutionary political organizations. As has been observed, the proletariat would inevitably destroy capitalism come what may, but they would do it the more rapidly and with less wastage of human life and substance if they were brought swiftly to a correct understanding of their current situation and possible aspirat SIB t, P. 35 2• 2 HF, P. 53, emphasis in original.

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85

tions. Thus Engels in his Speech at the Graveside praised Marx for having tried `to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation'? This, then, was the rationale of Marx's life work in the cause of working class emancipation. The emancipation of the working class must be the work of that class, but persons who were not proletarians could certainly make a significant contribution if they were able to give the workers an objective analysis of the current situation together with a demonstration of what would be the outcome of that situation. Full revolutionary consciousness was thus the destination of the proletariat, and indeed their numbers could only be decisive when they were (as Marx put it in 1864) `united by combination and led by knowledge',2 when they were, in effect, transformed into a gigantic political party. The development of the proletariat as a class `for itself' was the culmination of capitalism as a mode of production, and any so-called `socialist' theory which had the effect of retarding this development met with the gravest disapproval on the part of our authors. Especially instructive in this context is Engels's denunciation of `Proudhonism' in his pamphlet on The Housing Question. To this theory Engels attributed a petty-bourgeois and thoroughly reactionary desire to wipe out the effects of the industrial revolution, and to have men desert the city and return each to his plot of land. Such desires were for Engels intolerable: In order to create the modern revolutionary class of the proletariat it was absolutely necessary to cut the umbilical cord which still bound the worker of the past to the land. The hand weaver who had his little house, garden and field along with his loom was a quiet, contented man, `godly and honourable', despite all misery and despite all political pressure; he doffed his cap to the rich, to the priest and to the officials of the state and inwardly was altogether a slave. It is precisely modern large-scale industry which has turned the worker, formerly chained to the land, into a completely propertyless proletarian, liberated from all traditional fetters, a free outlaw; it is precisely this economic revolution which has created 1 SW11, P. 154; see also iUd.,p. 142,for a similar account by Engels of `the task

of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism'. 2 SW I, P. 348.

86

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels the sole conditions under which the exploitation of the working class ... can be overthrown."

The above discussion of the resemblances between the proletarian revolution and previous class revolutions may conveniently be followed by a consideration of the unique elements to be anticipated in the forthcoming `expropriation of the expropriators'. Most obvious of these unique elements is the fact that, as Marx and Engels understood the matter, the revolution of the proletariat would not have the long-term result (as had other revolutions) of merely replacing one ruling class by another. For a short period the proletariat would be obliged to use coercion against the remaining reactionary groups within society, but this stage of the `dictatorship of the proletariat' would be but a prelude to the abolition of all classes and class distinctions. Therefore although the proletarian revolution was to be carried through within the framework of a class-divided society, in fact it shattered that framework and pointed the way towards a classless society. Previous revolutions had released men from the grip of a particular ruling class (while at the same time subordinating them to the interests of their successors), whereas the outcome of the proletarian revolution would be to release men from the grip of class-divided society as such, and therefore also from the grip of the politician, for the politician was the inevitable accompaniment of the class-divided society. When the revolution broke out, the vast majority of people within society would belong to the proletarian class (and this is the revolutionary instrument which the bourgeoisie had willy-nilly created and trained) and thus there could be no class or classes below the proletariat over whom its members could hold sway. Consequently there was a very real sense in which the proletariat, in abolishing capitalism also abolished themselves as proletarians, and in instituting the period of human `history' properly so-called inaugurated a society in which every person could lead a `truly human' existence. The proletariat thus had a unique role assigned to them in the works of Marx and Engels. In one of his earliest compositions, Marx described the proletariat as an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no parti1

STS I, P. 511.

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87

cular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetrated against it ... which cannot emancipate itself without ... thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which ... is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man? This passage contains terms and a certain flamboyance of phrase which Marx subsequently abandoned, but in essentials this always remained the Marxian conception of the proletariat and of their destiny. Now the proletariat not only abolished themselves in the sense of abolishing class-divided society: Marx also suggested in at least one work that the members of the victorious proletariat also change themselves (or at least prepare the way for a modification of their several natures) in the actual revolutionary process. In the German Ideology he writes: For the success of the [communist] cause ... the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.2 Further on in the German Ideology, Marx returned to this theme of man both actor and author in the drama of history. The workers, he asserted, `know too well that only under changed circumstances will they cease to be "as of old", and therefore they are determined to change these circumstances at the first opportunity. In revolutionary activity the changing of oneself coincides with the changing of circumstances.13 A further unique feature of the proletarian revolution was the fact that, as conceived by Marx and Engels, it would be provoked by the suffering and misery of the oppressed class. Suffering and wretchedness had always been blatantly apparent during the period of human `prehistory', but these factors had not hitherto been the cause of successful 1 The

Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, OR, pp. 56-7. 3 Ibid., p. zio. Ideology, p. 86.

2 German

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

88

class revolutions. The bourgeoisie, for instance, had been angry at and frustrated by the continued rule of the feudal nobility, but they did not revolt because they were suffering in the sense that the nineteenth century proletarians were suffering. However, it was the utter wretchedness of the proletarians which made them desperate and passionate opponents of the status quo, which made them determined to confront the whole capitalist apparatus in a `life-and-death struggle'.' The proletarian ... who like every other person is called upon to satisfy his needs and who is not in a position to satisfy even the needs that he has in common with other people, whom the necessity to work a fourteen-hour day debases to the level of a beast of burden, whom competition degrades to a mere thing, an article of trade, who from his position as a mere productive force, the sole position left to him, is squeezed out by other, more powerful productive forces—this proletarian if only for these reasons is confronted with the real task of revolutionizing his conditions.2 Given that mass misery was the driving force of the revolution, it followed that the great upheaval would coincide with an economic crisis; and though the position of Marx and Engels is not wholly clear, this appears to have been their post-1848 view. After the European revolutions of 1848-9 had run their course, Marx and Engels reviewed the situation in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and concluded that the 1 GI, p• 235- It was because Marx recognized the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as one of life and death (as indeed had been many of the class struggles of the past) that he could tolerate no purportedly socialist beliefs which tended to mitigate or gloss over the class struggle. Thus when he and Engels issued in 1879 a circular letter condemning such beliefs, they stated that `for almost forty years we have stressed the class struggle ... between bourgeoisie and proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; it is, therefore, impossible for us to cooperate with people who wish to expunge this class struggle from the movement' (SC, P. 395). A quarter of a century earlier, Marx and Engels had made the same point: `The actual property-owners stand on one side and the propertyless communist proletarians on the other. This opposition becomes keener day by day and is rapidly driving to a crisis. If ... the theoretical representatives of the proletariat wish their literary activity to have any practical effect, they must first and foremost insist that all phrases be swept aside which tend to dim the realization of the sharpness of this opposition, all phrases tending to conceal this opposition and giving the bourgeois a chance to approach the communists for safety's sake on the strength of their philanthropic enthusiasms' (GI, pp. 516-1'7). 2

Ibid., p. 312.

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Proletarian Revolution

overthrow of the capitalist system in advanced countries like France and Britain' was not imminent: In view of the general prosperity which now prevails and permits the productive forces of bourgeois society to develop as rapidly as is at all possible within the framework of bourgeois society, there can be no question of any real revolution. Such a revolution is possible only in a period when two factors collide; when the modern productive forces collide with the bourgeois mode of production.... A new revolution will be made possible only as the result of a new crisis, but it is just as certain as is the coming of the crisis itself.2 Nevertheless, Marx and Engels subsequently permitted themselves to hope that events (or anticipated events) other than economic crises (such as Louis Napoleon's coup d'itat of í85z, a revolution in Ireland, and the American Civil War) might have the effect of causing a revolution. And when an economic crisis was forthcoming in 1857, they felt sure that their moment had arrived. Engels thought that he was about to have an opportunity to reap practical rewards from his military studies, while Marx wrote that he was `working like mad, day and night, at putting my economic studies together so that I may at least have the outlines clear before the deluge comes'.3 As always, their hopes were destined to come to nothing. It will be observed that in the passage from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung quoted above, Marx brought together what appear to be the two main elements in his theory of proletarian revolution: `increasing misery', and the alleged collision between the productive forces and the bourgeois relations of production. Leopold Schwarzschild, in his interesting and exceedingly hostile study of Marx, The Red Prussian, has pointed to these two elements, hinting at their lack of relation, if not at their inconsistency.4 It will not be argued here that Marx's theory of revolution is wholly clear or wholly consistent, but it is evident that if the account given above' of what he meant when he 1 In relatively backward countries like Germany, the communist task was of course to promote the bourgeois revolution. 2 Quoted in Mehring, Karl Marx, pp. 2o7-8. 3 Marx to Engels, 8 December 185 7, quoted by Schwarzschild, The Red Prussian,

P. 238. 4 pp. 300-1.

1 See

above, pp. 8o-1.

go

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

spoke of the forces of production coming into conflict with the bourgeois relations of production is correct, then at least it can be said that the two elements are closely related, for it was surely at a time of economic crisis when unemployment increased that the wretchedness of the working class was likely to be most apparent. Connected with the doctrine of increasing misery is the notion that the proletarian revolution would ultimately be an international revolution which would have the effect of abolishing the nations of Europe. The proletariat, as they were emerging in Europe, were an international class, having in common their `chains' and for whom `nationality is already dead'.' The bourgeoisie had by their wide-ranging economic activities made it possible for the first time to speak of `world history', but the members of that class still retained some national identity and interests while to the proletariat these interests could mean nothing. Thus for Marx the revolution was to be accomplished by a violente mass uprising of the whole proletariat as a class `for itself' against the capitalists (whose unity of purpose would crumble as the final crisis approached),3 and against the state machine—the army, the police, the courts and the bureaucracy—which, in serving the interests of the capitalists, oppressed them. One further point remains to be considered in connection with Marx's theory of revolution; and it is important, for it concerns the fundamental nature of the whole Marxian system. As the writer understands Marx and Engels, they believed that European societies progressed through a series of socio-economic forms of life, forms of life essentially determined in their character by the techniques of production employed at any particular stage. There thus existed a mutual correlation between the mode of production, `the legal and political superstructure',¢ and the `definite forms of social consciousness'.5 It followed from the `materialist conception of history' that there were certain

p. 76Though he seemed to incline towards the belief that in Britain and the United States and perhaps Holland the establishment of manhood suffrage might enable the workers to take over political power peacefully, although (according to Engels) he `never forgot to add that he hardly expected the English ruling classes to submit, without a "pro-slavery rebellion" to this peaceful and legal revolution' (Preface to English edition of Capital i, p. 6). See also G. Lichtheim, Marxism: An historical and critical study, p. 99. 0 See GI, p. p6. 4 ,5W I, p. 329. 5 Ibid. 1 GI,

2

Proletarian Revolution

9i

junctures when specific proposals concerning what should be done were appropriate to the human predicament, and certain junctures when the opposite was the case. And Marx and Engels were to be found pronouncing verdictsl upon various doctrines and practical proposals in the light of what empirical studies, studies guided by the doctrine of historical materialism, led them to believe were useful or futile courses of action. In short, they claimed to be able to discern in a scientific manner what should be done by the working class and by their allies at any particular point in time in any given country. The fundamental premises upon which these verdicts were grounded are that European societies (or perhaps Western European societies) are bound to pass through certain stages of socio-economic development, with the corresponding forms of class struggle, culminating in communism; and that (as Marx put it in a celebrated passage) `no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself'.e It was Marx's view in fact that the great expansion of the productiveness of human labour which had been elicited by the capitalist system (although involving untold suffering) was an indispensable presupposition of the emergence of communism. He put this point strikingly in Capital. `it is only by dint of the most extravagant waste of individual development that the development of the human race is at all safeguarded and maintained in the epoch of history immediately preceding the conscious reorganization of society. '3 There is, of course, a quite clear sense in which Marx believed in `progress'. Indeed, he put great emphasis upon man's increasing dominion over nature, and held that this dominion was in fact a presupposition of communist society. Moreover, there are passages in which he indicated that a revolutionary class perform some services for the people of a country as a whole. In the Communist Manifesto, for instance, it is stated that the bourgeoisie have `rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life' .4 Relatedly, he and Engels certainly believed in the subordination of `barbarous' to `civilized' peoples, and again this subordination was seen as in part the 1 But 2

see Appendix on `Marx's "Verdict" on Russia'. 8 in, p, 88, SW 1, p. Sag. 4 SW I, P- 37-

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Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

handiwork of the bourgeoisie. Thus in 1849 Engels anticipated with relish the disappearance `from the earth' of `entirely reactionary peoples',' such as the Slays, whose activities were delaying the advancement of the other revolutionary peoples of Europe. And at this time he and Marx advocated a general war against Russia to rid Europe of what they regarded as the most serious obstacle to revolutionary progress. Noteworthy also in this context is Marx's `defence' of British rule in India on the ground that, detestable though it was, it was much to be preferred to an `oriental despotism' presiding over a stationary and barbarous society;2 and his comment on Prussia's somewhat disastrous war with Denmark in 1848 over the Duchy of Schleswig: `Germany's annexation of Schleswig is an expression of the rights of civilization over barbarism, of progress over stagnation. And even if the treaties were in favour of Denmark, the rights of civilization and progress count for more than all treaties because such is the law of historical development.'3 Marx, then, believed in progress and in a `scale of civilizations'; yet there is little evidence that he regarded civilized man as being happier than other sorts of men. On the contrary, there are indications in the Communist Manifest04 and elsewhere that the lot of the present day proletarian was considered by him to be worse than that of almost any other person who had ever lived. Marx and Engels believed themselves to have what might be called genuine historical consciousness,5 and derivatively to have also an informed awareness of the possibilities inherent in a given situation. They emphasized the necessity for empirical research as the only basis for rational revolutionary activity, and they certainly took their own sociological studies very seriously. Franz Mehring quotes Marx as saying, á propos his long hours at the British Museum: `Naturally, the democratic simpletons whose inspiration comes "from above" have IRM p. 6.7. ,

a See Marx's article `The British Rule in India', SW 4 pp. 312-183 Quoted by Schwarzschild, The Red Prussian, pp. 189-9o. 4 See SW i, P. 43• 5 Cf. Marx's comment on Feuerbach: `He does not see how the sensuous world around him is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society ... that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its intercourse, modifying its social organization according to changed needs' (GI, p. 57).

93

Proletarian Revolution

no need to do anything of that sort. Why should the innocents bother their heads about economics and history? As the worthy Willich used to say to me, everything is so simple. Everything is so simple 1 In their confused heads perhaps, for they are really great simpletons'.' The manner in which Marx and Engels were led to dismiss various kinds of non-revolutionary socialism has already been observed. What must now be noticed is their rebuttal of calls for proletarian revolution on the ground that the calls were, for good empirical reasons, premature and would lead to disaster. Revolutionaries, Marx and Engels believed, must be prepared to face facts. Revolutionaries must accept, for instance, that European capitalism was an historically necessary stage in the development of society and that it was not to be overthrown until it had run its course and exhausted its creative potential. It was appropriate, therefore, for Marx to explain, when introducing the first volume of Capital, that although the ultimate aim of this work was `to lay bare the economic laws of motion of modern society', knowledge of these laws would not enable a society to `clear by bold leaps, nor to overcome by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by successive phases of its normal development'. But such a knowledge would certainly encourage the spread of socialist beliefs, and thereby enable society to `shorten and lessen the birth pangs'z of the new form of social life. It followed from the Marxian conception of the history of European society that in economically backward Germany where feudal regimes still held sway, the task of the Marxist was to await with anticipation —nay more, to assist—the bourgeoisie in making their revolution. As Engels remarked in an article in the Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung of 23 January 1848: We are no friends of the bourgeoisie ... but we do not grudge the bourgeoisie its triumph ... we observe the terrible earnestness, the pathetic enthusiasm with which the bourgeois set to work ... they are so short-sighted as to fancy that through their triumph the world will assume its final configuration. Yet nothing is more likely than that they are preparing the way for us, the democrats and communists.... Everywhere the proletariat stands at their rear.... Continue to struggle bravely forward, most worshipful 1

Op. Cit., P. 2I1.

2

p. 9.

94

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels masters of capital! We need you for the present.... You have to clear the vestiges of the Middle Ages and of absolute monarchy out of our path; you have to annihilate patriarchalism; you have to centralize administration; you have to convert the more or less owing classes into genuine proletarians, into recruits for our ranks; by your factories and your commercial relationships you must create the material means which the proletariat needs for the attainment of freedom.'

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95

Likewise, Marx had enquired in the previous year why the German workers should prefer `the direct rule of the bourgeoisie to the brutal oppression of absolute government, with its semi-feudal retinue'. His answer was that:

forces have been created for which private property becomes a restricting fetter'.' The reliance on will in politics was a leading characteristic of what might be called `Blanquist putschism' (i.e. the doctrine that the revolution could be produced by the actions of a handful of ruthless and determined men) and such doctrines (which Marx and Engels opposed consistently) were held by our authors to exhibit a dangerous unwillingness to face facts. The Blanquists were in fact `alchemists of the revolution', optimistically bent upon the making of a premature revolution by means of an agency (i.e. the conspiratorial party) inherently incapable of producing anything satisfactory. Marx's attitude towards `putschism' emerges very clearly from an article which he and Engels wrote in 185o:

The workers know that the bourgeoisie must not only make them wider concessions than absolute monarchy, but that in the interests of its commerce and industry, the bourgeoisie must create against its will the conditions for the unity of the workers, and the unity of the workers is the first requisite for their victory. The workers know that the abolition of bourgeois property relations is not brought about by the maintenance of feudal property relations. They know their own revolutionary movement can only be accelerated through the revolutionary movement of the bourgeoisie against the feudal orders and the absolute monarchy. They know that their own struggle with the bourgeoisie can only break out on the day the bourgeoisie triumphs.... They can and must take part in the middle class revolution as a condition preliminary to the Labour revolution.2

It goes without saying that these conspirators do not restrict themselves in general to organizing the revolutionary proletariat. Their job indeed consists in forestalling the process of revolutionary development, pushing it artificially into crises, making a revolution on the spur of the moment without the conditions for a revolution. For them the only condition for a revolution is a sufficient organization of their conspiracy. They are the alchemists of revolution, and wholly share the confusion of ideas and the limitation to fixed notions of the old alchemists. They grab eagerly at new contraptions to achieve the revolutionary miracle: incendiary bombs, explosive devices with magical powers, riots.... Busy with such plot-mongering, they have no other aim than the next overthrow of the existing government, and look with deepest disdain on a more theoretical clarification of the workers as to their class interests.2

Similarly, Marx warned the communists in the German Ideology that the institution of private property cannot be abolished merely because some people will its abolition, for `private property is a form of intercourse necessary for certain stages of development of the productive forces; a form of intercourse that cannot be abolished, and cannot be dispensed with in the production of direct material life, until productive 1 R. pp. 284-5. 2 `Moralizing criticism

and critical morality: a polemic against Karl Heinzen', in Selected Essays (ed. J. H. Stenning), pp. i6o—i.

Putschism, then, was a doctrine and a disposition to action of which the presupposition was a fundamental lack of contact with historical ' German Ideology, P. 386. 2 Quoted by H. Draper, `Marx and the dictatorship of the proletariat', Etudes de Marxology (6, 1962), P. 36; cf. George Sorel's assertion that `Blanquism is, in essence, nothing more than the revolt of the poor conducted by a revolutionary General Staff. Such a revolt can occur in any epoch whatsoever. It is independent of the system of production. Marx, on the contrary, considers that a revolution is made by a proletariat of producers who acquired economic capacity, intelligence in work, and juridical judgment under the very influence of conditions of production' (The Decomposition of Marxism, appended to I. L. Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason, Routledge, í96i, p. 240.

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Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

reality, and this in turn gave rise to a gross misconstruction of the nature of the revolutionary process and to a radical underestimation of the scale of the social movement involved. Naturally, some of Marx's fellow revolutionaries were not at all disposed to delay the great uprising and allow capitalism to run its course, and Marx himself recounted how he was castigated for his `doctrinaire indifference' when he condemned as `dangerous tomfoolery' a proposed insurrection of factory workers in the Iserlohn area' What Marx doubtless considered his correct appreciation of the realities of a situation appears perhaps most clearly, however, when he lectured the minority of members of the Central Committee of the Communist League in September 185o about the impossibility of an immediate transition to communist society in Germany. The minority replaces critical observation with dogmatism, a materialist attitude with an idealist one. It regards its own wishes as the driving force of the revolution instead of the real facts of the situation. Whilst we tell the workers that they must go through fifteen, twenty, perhaps even fifty years of war and civil war, not only in order to alter existing conditions, but even to make themselves fit to take over political power, you tell them, on the contrary, that they must seize political power at once or abandon all hope. Whilst we point out how undeveloped the German proletariat still is, you flatter the nationalism and the craft prejudices of the German artizan in the crudest fashion, and that is naturally more popular.' In the previous year an open letter which circulated on the Continent had repeated in strong language the accusation of `doctrinaire indifference' against Marx, and in effect denounced him as being a bogus revolutionary: Must we really, Herr Preacher, as you advise us, avoid the inferno of the Middle Ages by throwing ourselves into the purgatory of the decrepit rule of capital, so that from there we may gain the misty paradise of your Communist articles of faith? ... You are not really interested in the freedom of the oppressed. For you the misery of the workers and the hunger of the poor are of only scientific 'Sec SC, p. 147.

2

Quoted in Mehring, Karl Marx, P. 2o6.

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and doctrinal interest. You are above such miseries.... You are not gripped by that which moves the hearts of men. You do not believe in the cause you pretend to represent.' These charges, of course, are unfair to Marx: poverty and wretchedness were not beyond his ken, and he was deeply interested in the freedom of the oppressed. But in the light of Marx's insistence upon the recognition of a certain time-scale in the development of society, the charges made against him are by no means unintelligible. ' Quoted in John Weiss, Moses Hess: Utopian Socialist (Wayne State University Press, í96o), P. 55; see also P. 58 for Hess's criticism of Marx in similar terms.

Future Society

VI FUTURE SOCIETY

Except in Marx's early writings, he and Engels had little to say directly about the nature of the society which would succeed the transitional period of the `dictatorship of the proletariat'. Indeed, on occasion they evinced a certain distaste for the activity of drawing up blue-prints for the new society; nevertheless, in broad outline, certain things may be said with some degree of confidence about communist society as it was envisaged by Marx and Engels. There could be no doubt that the capitalist system, which reduced most members of society to a hellish condition as `wage slaves' would turn out to be but a precursor of an infinitely more desirable form of society in which, for the first time, men would control their own destinies by ordering their lives according to a commonly agreed plan for society as a whole. Cooperative planning was, of course, the common remedy proposed by socialistic writers for the evident shortcomings of capitalist society. `Organization of labour', and `association' (which indicated some form of communal ownership of the means of production) became in fact the slogans of the men of the left at the time when Marx and Engels were working out their revolutionary doctrines. For several decades [writes O. J. Hammen], alert observers had become conscious of an apparent contradiction in nineteenth century civilization. Unmistakable evidence of growing wealth, increased production, and a plenitude of goods stood in sharp contrast with the blatant poverty of the urban masses. The latter seemed to increase and become more universal with the rise of each new city and factory. By the 1840s it became a commonplace to note that the multiplication of machines and wealth brought a concomitant impoverishment of the workers. Most observers recognized that the situation was untenable and potentially dangerous.,Not untypical of these observers was Engels himself in his `preMarxian' period. His experiences while working at the Manchester "'The spectre of Communism in the 184os', Journal of the History of Ideas, 14, 40 5•

1953, P•

99

branch of his father's firm in the period 1842-3 provided him with the material from which sprang his book on the Condition of the Dorking Class in England in z 844 and a number of articles describing industrialism and criticizing bourgeois political economy. In his `Outlines of a critique of political economy', published in the Deutsch-Francosische Jahrbucher, he commented on the fact that with the capitalist regime in Britain `a stage ... [has been] reached in the development of production where there is so much superfluous productive power that the great mass of the nation has nothing to live on, that the people starve from sheer abundance. For some considerable time England has found herself in this crazy position, in this living absurdity'.1 Science, he continued, `increasingly makes the power of nature subject to man', and had brought about a situation in which `this immeasurable productive capacity, handled with consciousness and in the interest of all, would soon reduce to a minimum the labour falling to the share of mankind'.2 The result thus far, however, had been gross overwork for one section of the working population and enforced idleness for the rest. The Marxian remedy for this predicament was the revolutionary destruction by the proletariat of the political power of the capitalist class and their allies, followed by the seizure of the means of production by the proletariat. The way would then be opened for production to proceed according to `a common plan'3 and `under the actual, predetermining control of society'.4 This planned production would do away with exploitation of any kind and would enable men to avoid the waste and general anarchy which was an outstanding feature of the capitalist system of production. And in planned production men would be able to, as it were, cooperate with nature in a farsighted way, and thus avoid those disasters which had followed man's assaults upon nature in pursuit of individual gain.5 The `industrial reserve army', whose labour power had been discarded under the capitalist system, could now be given useful work, and along with other workers would be freed from the fear of the stigma of social superfluity. Production itself would be greatly expanded, while labour, which had been a dehumanizing drudgery, would become `life's prime want'.e Marx 1 Appended to Marx's EPM, p. 198. 2 Ibid., p. 199, emphasis added. a SW 1, P. 474. 4 Capital In, p. 18 45 See Engels's essay `The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man', SW n, p. 85. 6 Bid., p. 23.

roo

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

wrote that `agriculture, mining, manufacture, in one word all branches of production will gradually be organized in the most effective manner. National centralization of the means of production will become the natural basis of a society composed of associations of free and equal producers consciously acting upon a common and rational plan." In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx clearly distinguished two stages through which society would pass subsequent to the revolution of the proletariat. The first phase, will, from Marx's account of it, be somewhat less than idyllic, and he is obliged to remind his readers that the society concerned will not have developed on its own foundations, and will therefore be `in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges'.' Equality in this context will mean principally an equal duty to work, and consumption will generally be in proportion to labour performed. Thus, when the inevitable deductions have been made for the renewal of the means of production, insurance, education, etc., one can say that `the same amount of labour which ... [the individual] has given to society in one form he receives back in another' 3 This exchange would apparently be achieved by the replacement of money, which as a communist theorist Marx had always hated, by non-circulating paper vouchers indicating the duration of the labour of each of the producers and `entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour time' .4 Marx freely admitted that this conception of the right of the individual was essentially bourgeois, and he also called upon his readers to face the fact that the application of a common standard to assess rewards would necessarily lead in the first communist period to considerable inequality as between individuals. Eventually, however, this comparatively grim stage of future society would be transcended and the developed communist society would be able to adopt as its precept `from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs'.5 Further, the `fetishism of commodities' would also disappear. Men would no longer be related through the exchange of commodities, and the products of labour would lose their independence and cease 1 `On the nationalization of land', quoted by Irving Fetscher in his article `Marx, Engels and future society', Survey, no. 38 (1961), p. 103. 2 SIV u, p. 21. 3 Ibid., p. 22. 4 Capital 11 (1 957), P• 358. 5 SW II, P. 23.

Future Society

ioi

to dominate the labourer. In communist society, Marx explained in his notebook, the labour of the individual is taken from the start as social labour. Therefore whatever the specific material form of the product which he creates or helps to create may be, that which he has bought with his labour is not a special specific product, but a specific share of the communal production. For this reason he has no special product that he has to exchange. His product is not an exchange value. The product does not have to be translated into a specific character form in order to acquire a universal character for the individual. Instead of a division of labour necessarily ending in the exchange of exchange value, we would have an organization of labour, which results in the participation of the individual in communal consumption? The difference between `a division of labour' and `an organization of labour' will be examined in a moment. Like other men in the past, the individual members of communist society would be obliged to perform a certain minimum amount of labour merely to keep themselves alive, and Marx referred to this particular labour as constituting the `realm of necessity'.2 However, with the organization of mechanized production in a rational manner, men will be able to `accomplish their task [i.e. perform this necessary labour] with the least expenditure of energy and under such conditions as are proper and worthy for human beings'.3 Over and above this `realm of necessity' there is what Marx called `the true realm of freedom'4 wherein men develop their inherent human potentialities. The `true realm of freedom' has for its necessary presupposition the unavoidable labour which men will perform within the `realm of necessity', but it is nevertheless a defining characteristic of work in a communist society. Production in communist society was, then, to be production subjected to the dictates of some overall plan whereby the various `contradictions' apparent in the present capitalist system would be eliminated. But an overall plan, which, as we have already noticed, involved the 1 Quoted

by E. Kamenka, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (Routledge,

1962), P. 156; emphasis in original. 3 Ibid. 2 Capital n1, p. Soo.

4 Ibid.

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Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

allocation of resources for purposes of health, insurance against natural disasters, etc., education, and for the renewal and expansion of the means of production, presupposed the presence in society of some authoritative means of making and implementing such a plan. These were not matters upon which Marx and Engels dwelt at any length, but some such arrangement does seem to be implied by some of their assertions. In the Communist Manifesto, for example, our authors declared that `when ... class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character'.' The `public power' does not cease to exist, it merely loses its `political' character, and the implication of this remark is that it ceases to be oppressive. It appeared, therefore, to Marx and Engels that there could be `authority' without politics, effective communal decision without coercion. In criticizing the anarchist position, Engels distinguished two kinds of authority, the exercise of both of which would be found necessary in the future. During the revolution and for a period afterwards, the proletariat would wield political authority, and their rule—though it would bring liberation to the majority—would certainly be coercive with regard to the former capitalists and their allies. Engels thus rejected the anarchist demand that the forthcoming proletarian revolution should be followed by the immediate abolition of political authority, by the abolition of the state. `Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution?' he demanded:

Future Society

with `equal liability of all to labour'.1 Production (which is to be greatly expanded), transport, communication and credit facilities are to be brought under centralized state control, while public schools will give free education to all children. The distinction between town and country is to be gradually eliminated by the `combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries',2 thus making possible `a more equable distribution of the population over the country's Plainly, these tasks required the exercise by the proletariat of coercive, yet liberating, political authority. However, as the reactionary elements in society are eliminated and class differences gradually disappear, the raison d'être of the state will likewise disappear. Although the state, in Engels's words, `at last ... becomes the real representative of the whole society',4 it is needed less and less, and eventually dies out, having become (along with class differences) an anachronism. At this juncture, as Engels put it in a famous passage, `the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of .production'.5 The fact would appear to be, then, that it was necessary to go into politics to get rid of politics. There must be no shirking of the political struggle which leads up to the proletarian revolution, or of the despotical exercise of political authority thereafter. Marx and I [Engels wrote, in the year of Marx's death], ever since 1845, have held the view that one of the final results of the future proletarian revolution will be the gradual dissolution and ultimate disappearance of that political organization called the State; an organization the main object of which has ever been to secure, by armed force, the economical subjection of the working majority to the wealthy minority. With the disappearance of a wealthy minority the necessity for an armed repressive State-force disappears also. At the same time we have always held, that in order to arrive at this and other, far more important ends of the social revolution of the future, the proletarian class will first have to possess itself of the organized political force of the State and with this aid stamp out the resistance of the Capitalist class and reorganize society.e

A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon—authoritarian means if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries.' In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels spelled out the tasks which, as they understood the matter, the proletariat acting as ruling class would find it necessary to accomplish. At the end of Section II of that document ten points were listed ,3 which indicate the abolition of capitalist private property and the emergence of an egalitarian society 1 Slit 1, P. 51. 3 See Slit 1, PP• 50-1. 2Ibid., P• 578.

103

I

Ibid., P. 51.

6 SC, PP. 436-7•

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 SIB, u, p. 138.

5 Ibid.

too

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

The notion of the `dictatorship of the proletariat' is thus relatively clear; but what of `the administration of things' which Engels (as we have seen)' supposed would thereafter replace `the government of persons'? Here one may refer to the second, non-political, kind of authority which Engels argued would still be necessary even after the disappearance of the State. It seems to have been the view of Marx and Engels that the exercise of this non-political authority was inherent in the nature of any societies. `Everywhere', Engels reported, `combined action, the complication of processes dependent upon each other, displaces independent action by individuals. But whoever mentions combined action speaks of organization; now is it possible to have organization without authority?" Engels proceeded to answer in the negative, for `wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel' 3 And such retrograde steps were, of course, out of the question. There is a parallel discussion of the subject in Capital iii, where, in a significant passage, Marx discussed what he called the `double nature' of the authority of the supervisors (the capitalists and their hired managers) in contemporary industry. A part of this authority is called forth by the conflict inherent in the capitalist relations of production, and is necessary to ensure the fullest exploitation of a hostile labour force. There is also a kind of authority which is indispensable in any operation which involves cooperative labour. `All labour', Marx wrote, `in which many individuals cooperate necessarily requires a commanding will to coordinate and unify the process, and functions which apply ... to the total activity of the workshop, much as that of an orchestra conductor. This is a productive job, which must be performed in every combined mode of production' 4 And Marx further observed that not only was this `local' authority necessary to combined production as such, but a more general coordinating authority was likewise inherently required by the existence of a community of producing beings. So far as the writer is aware, this intriguing conception of a nonpolitical type of authority was never discussed at any length by either Marx or Engels, and it is fruitless to speculate much about the outcome of such a discussion had they ever embarked upon it. It appears that 4 3 Ibid., p. 576. 1 See above, p. 103. 2 SLR/ I, P. 575• P- 376•

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on this matter one must be content with generalities to the effect that this second type of authority would be a characteristic of the fully developed communist society, and that its exercise would not involve coercion, being somehow self-imposed. It appears, however, that aside from the absence of exploitation and `political power properly so called', the outstanding characteristic of communist society as conceived by Marx and Engels was to be the socalled abolition of the division of labour, the division of labour which had appeared in all class-divided societies, but which had reached a hideous peak in the last period of capitalist society. The tragic effects of the minute division of labour upon human beings under capitalism was a constant concern of Marx's, and he insisted that it be abolished. Indeed, he stated categorically in Capital that modern society must abolish the division of labour `under penalty of death',' and although this statement may be somewhat hyperbolic, his reasoning is not difficult to follow. Modern machinery as it is used (wrongly, Marx maintains)' in capitalist society has had the effect of shackling the worker to the machine and of making him a `specialist' in the performance of a simple and trivial task which he repeats endlessly day by day. The various crafts and skills of a former era have been swept away by the machine: workers have become `annexed'3 to machines and are now distinguished only in terms of age and sex. Science itself has become an oppressive power embodied in the machines. Furthermore, it is not only the workers who were obliged to suffer the catastrophic effects of the division of labour. Also smitten, according to Engels, were the classes directly or indirectly exploiting the labourers [for they also] are made subject, through the division of labour, to the tool of their function: the empty-headed bourgeois to his own capital and his own insane craving for profits; the lawyer to his fossilized legal conceptions, which dominate him as an independent power; the `educated classes' in general to their manifold species of local narrow-mindedness and one-sidedness .4 In the situation current at the end of the capitalist period, even the lightening of labour ... becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far ' i, P. 488. 3 Ibid., P. 421• 4 e4nti-Duhring, p. 406. ' See ibid., P. 422.

io6

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

as it is ... a process of creating surplus value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman.... By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer ... in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour power. The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour, is ... finally completed by modern industry erected on the foundation of machinery.' And those workers who were not thus `alienated' by mechanized production tended to be put out of work altogether by the constant revolutions in the labour process which were attendant upon such production; that is to say, the minimal machine-minding skills which men did have tended to be rendered obsolete when new machines were introduced. It was Marx's view that the division of labour, with its horrific consequences for the individuals involved, was (or would soon become) unnecessary. Machines, that is to say, could be, indeed, must be, used properly. There was no necessity for the worker to become the victim of a single, repetitive function, perhaps for years or even decades. For, as Marx argued in Capital i, `since the motion of the whole system does not proceed from the workman, but from the machinery, a change of persons can take place at any time without an interruption of the work'.2 This being the case, there is no reason why communist man should not have a multiplicity of occupations to stimulate his creative capacities and fulfil himself as a human being. This is what Marx seems to have meant when he wrote, as he often did, of the abolition of the division of labour. Individual men in communist society would still, of course, work at machines for limited periods, and in this sense a division of labour would remain, but Marx called this division of labour a `voluntary' one,3 and contrasted it with what he terms in this context a `natural' division of labour, which is involuntary and is the product of a society in which production `is not subordinated to a general plan of freely combined individuals14 and in which, consequently, a conflict exists between the particular and the 1 Capital 1, p. 423.

2 Ibid., p. 421.

3 GI, P. 44.

4 GI, p. 88.

Future Society

107

common interest. In accordance then with this voluntary division of labour in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.' And this voluntary system will have the effect of abolishing the distinction between work and pleasure ,2 and it is the condition of there being what Marx called `an all-round development of individuals1,3 an `allround development' which would in turn result in greatly increased production with `the springs of cooperative wealth flow[ing] more abundantly'.4 Thus, strictly speaking, it was not the division of labour which was due for supersession in communist society, for such a division was made necessary by modern techniques of production, but rather what Marx called in the Critique of the Gotha Programme `the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour'.5 Engels's Principles of Communism (in a passage which found no counterpart in the Communist Manifesto) had similarly emphasized the necessity for communist man to have a number of functions in society. We read here that `when the whole of society shall carry on industry, communally and purposively, then workers will be needed whose capacities have been developed from every point of view, workers capable of taking charge of the entire system of production' 6 Thus the present division of labour which compels one man to be a peasant, another a shoemaker, another a factory hand, another a broker on the stock exchange, will completely disappear. The young folk as they pass through the schools [Engels continues] will be taught the whole ' Ibid., pp. 44-5• It will be observed that this vision of communist man, unlike

many other humanist theories, puts no emphasis upon the development of his purely intellectual powers. Communist man's self-fulfilment is to be found as much in manual as in mental activities. Thus it may be suggested that it was a not inappropriate vision, susceptible of fulfilment by all members of future society. 5 Ibid. 2 See ibid., P. 234. 3 Ibid., P. 483. 4 SIV 11, p. 23. 6

R P- 335ME —H'

zo8

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels system of production as part of their education, they will be in a position to pass from one branch of industry to another, according as social needs shall require or as their own inclinations impel.... Thus a communistically organized society will be able to provide opportunities for the cultivation of all-round capacities.,

Engels proceeded to make the interesting suggestion, to be repeated in the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, that because of the abolition of the division of labour (as this was understood by Marx and himself), `the contrast between the town and the countryside will likewise disappear',2 for the performance of agricultural and industrial labour by two more or less permanently fixed sets of persons would no longer be necessary. Therefore the future would see `the erection of palatial dwellings on the national domains where communities of citizens shall live together for the carrying on of industry and agriculture; where the advantages of town life shall be linked with those of country life without having to suffer from the one-sidedness and the disadvantages of either.'3 This was a point taken up at some length by Engels in 4nti-Duhring, in which he affirmed that the abolition of the `antithesis' (as he calls it) between town and country has now become a positive necessity. Modern production need not be located in a particular area (`waterpower is local; steam-power is free'))4 although during the capitalist period industry has tended more and more to concentrate in the towns. However, this concentration, as well as being the cause of much illhealth was becoming increasingly inexpedient, for `the first requirement of the steam-engine, and a main requirement of almost all branches of production in modern industry, is relatively pure water. But the factory town transforms all water into stinking manure.'-' Clearly, for Engels only a socialist plan could put an end to this anomalous situation: the present poisoning of the air, water and land can be put an end to only by the fusion of town and country; and only such fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of diseases

P- 335Bid., p. 4.1 I.

1 R•, 6

2 lbid.

3 Ibid., P. 332•

4 P. 410.

5 Ibid.

Future Society

iog

Many of these prophecies, outlined above, concerning the development of future society have not infrequently struck observers as having little relationship to any conceivable reality. Dr Eugene Kamenka, for example, has remarked in a recent monograph on `the patent utopianism of [Marx's] conception of the truly human society with its spontaneous co-operative morality',, and has called in question the plausibility of Marx's vision of a society in which the State and the law have been forgotten and in which `men will see in each other their natural collaborators and colleagues and significant social conflict will become impossible'.2 It is, of course, beyond my present purpose to support these criticisms, or to defend Marxism against them: suffice it to repeat that the changes envisaged by Marx did (as we have observed in Chapter Two) presuppose a drastic transformation, in the revolutionary act and thereafter of human nature itself. And that, surely, is of all human undertakings the most ambitious. 1

Marxism and Ethics (Macmillan, 1969), P. 29.

2 Ibid.,

p. 30.

Conclusion

CONCLUSION

The foregoing account of Marxian thought sought neither to attack nor to defend the ideas of Marx and Engels. It was intended merely to be an account, displaying as fully as possible the internal coherence which the ideas in question seem to possess. To some extent, this account has been developed in conscious, but so far almost unstated, opposition to what appears to be a largely original and newly fashionable conception of the essential nature of the Marxism of Marx and Engels. It is therefore appropriate to conclude by making explicit the distinction between the conception developed above and the new line of argument. While there is no reason to suppose that the exciting theory concerning the past should necessarily be preferred to the less exciting one, there can be no doubt that this new picture of Marxism is intellectually arresting, and if true, will make necessary the re-writing of many of the relevant commentaries. The new picture is to be found in Dr Robert Tucker's book Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx and in Professor Louis Halle's Encounter article entitled `Marx's religious drama'' Now these two authors do not agree on all points, but there exists such a degree of similarity between their respective understandings of Marx (indeed, Professor Halle himself acknowledges his debt to Tucker's book2) that it is possible to consider them together. Both Tucker and Halle attempt to demonstrate that Marxism is not what it appears to be to the superficial reader of the main works of Marx and Engels, and that Marxism is not what Marx and Engels announced it to be. Tucker and Halle are thus at one in finding a `latent content' in Marxism. According to these writers, Marxism is not essentially a scientific sociological analysis of the history of human society to which is appended a set of predictions concerning the future development of that society. Rather it is a religious or quasi-religious myth consisting of a disguised morality play in which the dramatis personae, `My Lord Capital' and the `Collective Worker', engage in a mortal combat, a combat wherein the former for long has the advantage which he exploits mercilessly, but is eventually struck down by the 1 Vol.

xxv, no. 4 (October, 1965).

2 See P. 30.

III

latter amid general rejoicing. Halle puts the matter thus: `In the final vision of Marxism there is a hero called the Proletariat and a villain called the Capitalist. The villain holds the hero in bondage and tortures him. But the hero is growing in his strength all the time, and secretly his wrath is rising as he continues to stoop under the villain's yoke. So history approaches its last act: the day when the hero shall suddenly rise up, and cast off his yoke, and burst asunder his chains. Then shall the mighty fall'.' For both Tucker and Halle the `social drama1 2 is the outcome of the projection of the `inner drama'3 of the alienated individual who appears in the writings of the young Marx, to which both of these authors attach very great importance, seeing them indeed as crucial to a correct understanding of Marxism as a whole. Marxism, then, is not in any significant sense a scientific or objective analysis of society4 and its history. In essence it is, in Tucker's words, `through and through a moralistic myth, a tale of good and evil, a story of struggle between constructive and destructive forces for possession of the world'.5 And `the underlying moral theme' of Marxism appears in Marx's earlier system and is `man's division against himself and dehumanization under the despotism of greed, and his final emancipation of himself and his productive activity from this despotism by the seizure of the alienated world of private property's In the later Marxian system, however, `the alienated man has been bifurcated. The conflicting subjective forces of creativity and the will to infinite selfaggrandizement are seen and shown as class forces clashing across the battleground of society.'' Marx thus appears not as a sociological writer, but as a romantic and a myth-maker intent on convincing men that their lost paradise is soon to be regained. He is, in fact, `a great visionary ... [having] more of St Paul in him than of the social scientist or the empirical scholar." Both writers, in supporting their contentions, are able to point to passages in Capital and elsewhere that read like a book of revelation, to the a priori nature of the young Marx's conception of the proletariat, and to the fact of Marx's passionate involvement (which Halle regards as inconsistent with `scientific detachment') in the class struggle which he depicted in his writings. According to Tucker, then, 2 Tucker, op. cit., P. 221. 3 Ibid. P. 37. But cf. Halle, op. cit., p. 33 where he curiously holds that while Marxism is really a `religious drama', Capital represents `the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition'. 8 Halle, op. cit., p. 29. 5 P. 222 s Ibid. ' Ibid. 1 4

112

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

Capital is not to be regarded as an obsolete analysis of capitalism: indeed, it is not an analysis, obsolete or otherwise, of anything; while for Halle Marx, in preaching to industrial man that soon the first would be last and the last would be first, `met the need for a religion of the industrial age'.1 Similarly, it was because Marxism was really a morality play that Marx could have no time for suggestions that some mediation or compromise was possible between capitalists and workers, and that their differences might be settled on the basis of a `fair distribution' of rewards. The class struggle in modern society could thus end only in the annihilation of the capitalists as a class.2 The account given above is but an abridgement of the theories concerned, and of necessity does considerably less than justice, especially to Dr Tucker, whose book is a most stimulating commentary and contains several outstanding passages. Nevertheless, the writer believes the foregoing passages to contain a not unfair summary of what might be termed the `Tucker—Halle' thesis concerning the nature of Marxism. It will be evident from the body of the present work that the writer cannot accept the Tucker—Halle thesis, and that what has been written here may be taken to some extent as being a counterthesis. It is not to be denied, of course, that Marx was a thoroughly moralistic writer, full of passionate indignation, full of a desire for the destruction of the social system of the advanced countries of Western Europe. Certainly one must take careful note of those not infrequent passages wherein Marx clearly writes with dramatic effect in mind: he speaks, for instance, of capitalism's `vampire thirst for the living blood of labour'3 and of the `knell of capitalist private property' sounding when the `expropriators are expropriated' 4 Further, there can be no doubt that Marx was very fond of both poetry and play-acting. Moreover, the writer would hesitate to endorse in full T. B. Bottomore's judgment that `the cast of Marx's mind was fundamentally scientific':' apart from the difficulties raised by the term `scientific', the difficulty here would be the understanding of the word `fundamentally', just as part of the difficulty with the Tucker—Halle thesis is its assertion that Marx was `essentially' a myth-maker, and care should be taken to avoid the error of inflating an element in Marx so as to make of it the `essence' of the whole. Marx, indeed, was a many-sided writer op. cit., P. 37. 2 See Tucker, op. cit., P. 222. 3 Capital i, p. 256. 1 Early Writings, Introduction, p. xiii. 4 Ibid., P. 763.

1 Halle,

Conclusion

113

in whose works several elements were put together to form a whole possessing a considerable degree of coherence. The very general view has been supported here that he was a `retrospective prophet'.' This designation may not capture the essence of Marxism, but it does seem to indicate the manner in which Marx's understanding of the past forms a whole with his vision of an inevitable future for Western man, and Henry Mayer's description of Marxism as a `teleological philosophy of history'2 has very much the same import. It would seem to be the case that Marx and Engels had a genuine longing for sociological knowledge and understanding wherewith to make plausible their `retrospective prophecy'. `Ignorance', an outraged Marx once told William Weitling (an advocate of immediate and undiscriminating revolution), `never helped nor did anybody any good'.3 Marx in particular (unlike Engels, he had no capitalist enterprise to run) displayed unremitting toil in his pursuit of information concerning human activities, and he is unstinting in his praise for those similarly engaged;4 and one recalls, for instance, that he went to the trouble of learning the Russian language in order to be able to follow more closely events in that country. Marx, of course, did not pursue knowledge for its own sake: with him theory and practice were said to compose a unified whole. We have noticed his view that the scientist's knowledge must be placed `at the service of humanity';' and, to pursue the illustration just given, his interest in Russia sprang from a somewhat belated realization of the revolutionary potentialities of that country. And, no doubt, it may be said that he had little difficulty in locating the empirical data which tended to support his various theories. Nevertheless, is his contention that his socialism had a broader empirical basis than other sorts of socialism wholly to be rejected as self-deception, even when (as ,we have seen) his sense of a necessary `time-scale' in the development of society and his understanding of the empirical situation led him to extreme caution about the possibility of a successful revolution and he was consequently obliged to face accusations of `doctrinaire above, p. 15. 2 `Marx, Engels and the politics of the peasantry', Etudes de Marxologie, 3 (i96o), P. 147• 3 Quoted by J. Lewis, Karl Marx: his life and teaching, p. 88. 1 See

4 See Marx's high opinion of the English factory inspectors, medical reporters and commissioners of enquiry, Capital 1, p. 9. 5 See above, p- 37•

114

Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels

indifference' for his pains?' The conclusion of this book is that while Marx was perhaps something of a dogmatist on some points, and not wholly clear or consistent on others, what might be called his scientific pretensions are to be taken seriously, and not simply dismissed as Marx's method of disguising (albeit unconsciously) what is `essentially' a moral or religious drama. And, it may be added, these pretensions have already been taken seriously by scholars (not all of whom have called themselves Marxists) who have in the past imagined that they derived intellectual inspiration from what Marx wrote. And the logical point might also be made here that even if the Tucker—Halle thesis concerning the `latent content' of Marxism were correct, the evaluation of Marx's economic and sociological assertions would still presumably have to be undertaken independently by the various scholars concerned.2 For the writer, finally, Marxism was a `retrospective prophecy': as such it had its poetry, its drama, its clear moral vision; but it also had a substantial empirical element to which Marx and others have attached great importance, and which in their view sets Marxism somewhat aside from other socialist systems of thought. However, the appraisal of this empirical element forms no part of the present discussion. 1 Marx's sense of history also, as we have seen, led him to an appreciation of the contributions to civilization of that arch-villain `My Lord Capital', and Dr Tucker, being well aware of Marx's opinion of these contributions, concludes that `in a significant sense My Lord Capital is the hero as well as the villain of Marx's mythic narrative' (p. 223). Here, at least, was a sophisticated morality play. z It should be recorded that Tucker (like Halle—see p. i io,no. 4) does make some concession to the picture of Marxism as a `science': `Marxism [he admits] has been one of the influential shaping forces in the evolution of modern social science, ... we owe in part to Marx our present heightened awareness of the economic factors in the history of civilization, and ... some particular elements within his system may be of enduring scientific interest and value' (p. 14). However, apart from this one sentence, that part of the rest of the book which specifically concerns Marxism seems to have the tendency of undermining the claims of Marx the scientific sociologist.

APPENDIX MARX'S `VERDICT' ON RUSSIA

In considering the matter of the Marxian `verdicts' upon various leftwing ideologies and practical revolutionary proposals, verdicts which it was maintained in Chapter V were based upon what Marx regarded as a correct understanding of the historical development of societies, it must be conceded that what are perhaps the most celebrated of these verdicts do not, on the face of it, support the general argument concerning Marxism here presented. The verdicts in question are those concerned with the future economic development of Russia, and derivatively with the course of action to be followed by the revolutionary movement in that country. It is clear that Marx had a considerable interest in both of these matters, but also that he was hard put to it to give a definitive opinion on them, even when specifically asked to do so by his followers in Russia. The basic difficulty was that in the 1870s and i88os capitalism was at but an early stage of development in Russia, and Marx's admirers were uncertain whether they should assist the bourgeois revolution as the only path to communism (a path which many of them would have naturally found very discouraging), or whether the Russian peasant commune presented a viable basis upon which communism might be instituted without recourse to the typically Western European development through capitalism to communism. Vera Zasulich wrote to Marx (`esteemed comrade') in 1881 requesting Marx's authoritative treatment of these questions, indicating that there were some Russian Marxists who had already made up their minds: `We hear often that the village community is an archaic form which history, scientific socialism, in one word, all theory which is above questioning, condemns to perdition. The people who preach this call themselves your special disciples.... The strongest of their arguments is often "Marx says so!" '1 Marx treated the Russian situation on three main relevant occasions: 1 RM,

p. 276.

Appendix

116

in his Letter on the Economic Development of Russia (1877); in the short (and rather vague) reply to Vera Zasulich, and the four drafts which preceded it (1881); and in the Preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto (1882). Marx's position in these writings may be summarized as follows: (1) he denies that Marxism is a `suprahistorical' theory, and therefore claims that what he calls his `sketch of the origin of capitalism in Western Europe's should not be transformed into `an historico-philosophical theory of a Universal Progress, fatally imposed on all peoples, regardless of the historical circumstances in which they find themselves';2 and he is able to quote from the French edition of Capital i of 1873 wherein he specifically limits the scope of his discussion to Western Europe; (2) he asserts that his studies of the Russian situation have led him to the conclusion that in certain circumstances the peasant commune might form the basis for indigenous Russian communism (i.e. if the decay of the commune itself could be halted, and if a revolution in Russia were to sound `the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West')3 thereby enabling Russia to avoid all the tribulations of the capitalist system. 1 Ibid.,

P. 217.

2 lbid.

3 1bid., p. 228.

INDEX

Bauer, Bruno, 2 Bentham, Jeremy, 2 5, 35

Hobsbawm, E. J., xi n. i Hood, K., 56

Carlyle, Thomas, 33 Chang, Sherman M., 66 Comte, Auguste, xii, 15 Condorcet, Antoine-Nicholas De,

International Working Man's Association, 14 15

Darwin, Charles, 48

Deutsche Brüsseller Zeitung, 4, 9 n. 2, 99

Deutsch-Franp5sische jahrbücher, 4,

9n. 2, 99 Engels, Frederick death, 14; influenced by Hess, i i; meets Marx, 4, 11; on the contrast of wealth and poverty in England, 99; on Marx, 1; on Marxism, u, 16, 22; studies in Britain, 11; work after Marx's death, 14 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 5-8, i0, 46, 92 n. 5 Fourier, Charles, 42 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 14 Halle, Louis on Marx as a visionary, i1o; on Marxism as a morality play, i io; on Marxism as a religion, 111 Hammen, Oscar J., quoted on early socialism, 98 Harvey, J., 56 Hegel, G. F., i, 5, 16-17 Hess, Moses, 3-4, 11 History, as a distinctive manner of reading the past, xi Hobbes, Thomas, 57

Lafargue, Paul, 37 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 24 Marx, Karl and the I.W.M.A., 14; arrested and tried for treason, 12-13; arrives in London, 13; as a student, 1; as a young radical, 2-3; born, 1; dies, 14; expelled from Germany, 13; expelled from Paris, 2 n. 2; fails to enter academic life, 2; his condition and work in exile, 13-14; moves to Paris to study economics and socialism, 2; proceeds to Brussels, 2 n. 2; returns to Germany, 12 Marxism (i.e. the theory of Marx and Engels) account of capitalism, 44-54; as a retrospective prophecy, 15, 112113; concept of alienation, 5-8, 56 n. 3; connection with ethics, 37-40; criticized for indifference to workers' cause, 96-7; definition of politics, 5 5; distinguished from mechanical materialism, ig; distinguishes a class in itself and a class for itself, 66 n. 4, 81-7; essential elements in history as discerned by, 2o—i; on the division of labour, io5-8; on English history, 63, 77; on English Revolution, 59, 76-7; on French history, 62, 64, 66-9; on French Revolution, 59,

118

Index

Marxism—contd. 76-7; on future society, 98-ro8;

on history as the history of consciousness, to, 0-17; on history as political history, 15-0; on the increasing misery of the proletariat, 47-5 2, 87-9; on natural rights, 57; on oriental despotism, 71 n. t; on Parliamentary `cretinism', 12; on the peasantry, 66-7, 82; on progress, gt-2; on proletarian revolution, 9, 69, 75-97; on Proudhonism, 85-6; on the State as class instrument, 55-64; on the State as an independent parasite, 64-8; scientific character of, 40-3; sees history in terms of class struggles, 27-31; verifies true propositions by successful practice, 18; views of human activity and human nature, 21-4, 87 Meek, Ronald L., 52 n. 2 Mill, John Stuart, xii Morris, William, quoted, 56

Oakeshott, Michael, xi n. 2, 15, 21 Owen, Robert, 42 Political Economy, `scientific' contrasted with `vulgar', 46 n. 4 Practice, the `idiom' of, ix Proudhon, P. J., i z Rheinische Zeitung, 2-3

Rousseau, J. J., 24 Schwarzchild, Leopold, 2 n. t, 89 Sorel, Georges, contrasts Marxism with Blanquism, 95 n. 2 Stein, Lorenz von, 3, 4 Strauss, David, 5 Saint-Simon, C. H., 41 Tucker, Robert, xi, 4, 6 denies that Marxism is a scientific theory, III; on Marxism as a moralistic myth, log-io

Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 12, 88, 89

Utopian Socialism, 41-3

Nicholas I, Czar, 2 New York Daily Tribune, 13

Young Hegelians, 1-2, io