GREGORY CLAEYS MARX AND MARXISM

GREGORY CLAEYS MARX AND MARXISM

The founder of the most important school of modern socialism, Karl Heinrich Marx was born at Trier, Germany, on 5 May 1818, the son of a Jewish lawyer who converted to Protestantism in 1824. He studied Law, History and Philosophy first at Bonn, then at Berlin, where he encountered the leading philosopher of the period, Georg Wilhelm

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Friedrich Hegel (see HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM). Here he allied himself with the ‘Young’ or ‘Left’ Hegelians, including BRUNO BAUER and MAX STIRNER, who believed that Hegel’s conception of dialectical historical development meant that the existing Prussian state was not the final stage of human development, but that the ‘spirit’ or ‘Idea’ might realize itself in a higher form. Marx in 1842 became a radical journalist and editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, which was suppressed the following year. Marrying Jenny von Westphalen, he emigrated to Paris.

At this time Marx fell under the influence of LUDWIG FEUERBACH, whose materialist philosophy contended that Hegel’s idea of ‘spirit’ was only a reflection of existing social conditions at any one time, and that ‘God’ was in fact only a projection of human wishes, and an acknowledgement of the absence of control over one’s own life. This idea is applied by Marx in his two main writings of this period. In his brief ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (1843), he expressed radical democratic views, and attacked Hegel’s devotion to monarchy, as well as his reliance upon the bureaucracy as a ‘universal’ class capable of mediating between conflicting egoistic interests in civil society. Instead, Marx views universal suffrage as the means of reconciling contending interests. In Paris, however, he encountered both French and émigré socialists, notably Wilhelm Weitling, as well as anarchists like PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON and MIKHAIL BAKUNIN. He also met in September 1844 a young Barmen merchant named Friedrich Engels (1820–95), who was resident in Manchester, an enthusiastic supporter of Chartist politics, and a recent convert to socialism. From this point onwards they began a life-long intellectual collaboration, basing their new world-view on a marriage of German philosophy, and particularly the critique of religion, French politics, particularly revolutionism, and British political economy. Engels had already begun to study the latter from an Owenite perspective in Manchester, which assisted the critical analysis presented in his Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, which details the degradation of the urban proletariat, the displacement of manual labour by machinery, the cyclical process of industrial boom and crisis, the resulting ‘social war, the war of each against all’, and the inevitability of revolution to abolish the existing system.

Already in 1843 Marx had announced that the only class capable of achieving political emancipation in Germany was the proletariat. In 1844 he announced his conversion to communism in an unpublished work, the ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’ or ‘Paris Manuscripts’ (printed in 1932), which also proposed a new critical standpoint, the theory of alienation. Marx’s starting-point in the ‘Paris Manuscripts’ was Adam Smith’s account of the division of labour in ch. 1, book 1, of the Wealth of Nations. Smith had described increasing economic specialization as the means by which commercial society would prove vastly more productive than any previous stage of economic development, while warning in book 5 of the potential ‘mental mutilation’ of the labouring class, and their reduction to a near-animal status, if, en masse, they were subjected to arduous, repetitive labour without some compensatory education. Marx’s critique of Smith relies on Feuerbach’s notion of ‘species being’, or the communal essence of mankind, which has been suppressed or eradicated in commercial society, which promotes only selfishness and egotism. Applying Feuerbach’s notion of religion as the abstract essence of man, Marx describes the alienation of human powers through money, exchange and production. There are four main types of alienated labour: (1) of the process of work from

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the labourer’s essence, since labour is usually forced; (2) of the worker from the product of labour as an alien object over him; (3) from man’s species-being, or his ability to relate to himself as a universal and free, ‘conscious, vital’ being, which turns free activity into a mere means of existence; (4) alienation from other people. Arguing that private property results from alienated labour, Marx contends that only an ending of private property can abolish it, and achieve a ‘general human emancipation’ in which ‘the social relationship of man to man’ becomes primary. Communism, however, was not to be a ‘levelling- down’, but is seen by Marx principally from a humanist viewpoint, as ‘the return of man out of religion, family, state, etc. into his human, i.e. social being’. This ideal of communism is not far distant from that of CHARLES FOURIER, in particular, with whom Marx and Engels clearly agreed as to the desirability of a regime of free, creative and varied labour as definitive of the future society. In addition, Marx envisions communism as entailing the abolition of the state, a position that brought him close to anarchist writers like Proudhon.

In the next few years, however, Marx and Engels were concerned to distance themselves from all of their radical and socialist predecessors and competitors, engaging in voluminous polemics that seem tiresome and inordinately drawn-out today. Bruno Bauer and his ‘True Socialist’ associates are the target in The Holy Family (1845), Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy (1846) and Max Stirner in much of the unpublished ‘German Ideology’ (written 1845–6). The latter work, however, included a vastly more important section devoted to the positive exposition of what Marx and Engels regarded as their own, new system of analysis, which was termed the ‘materialist conception of history’, which involves equally a renunciation of many of Marx and Engels’s own earlier views, including the Feuerbachian standpoint of the ‘Paris Manuscripts’. For now, the manuscript argues, a historical form of materialism supersedes the abstract, humanist materialism of Feuerbach, with its fixed conception of human nature. Social evolution is now defined in terms of a causal, determinist theory of economic development: ‘the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy’, rather than in any abstract ‘spirit’ or conception of national character. According to the new analysis, all societies rest upon an economic ‘basis’, which consists of a mode of production or system of property ownership. Upon this basis there rises in every society a ‘superstructure’, which includes religion, law, politics and even ideas. Thought, therefore—contra Hegel—has no independent existence, but is derived from actual material conditions: ‘Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life’, and the ruling ideas, or ideology, in any epoch are derived from the ruling class of that period, and justify its claims to supremacy. Changes in the economic basis accordingly produce alterations in all aspects of the superstructure. As a materialist model priority is thus given to economic organization over such factors as climate or the distribution of natural resources.

Taking up the conjectural history of the Scottish Enlightenment in particular, which had stressed the passage of all societies through four main stages (hunting and gathering; pastoral; agricultural; commercial) Marx and Engels then describe three main historical forms of property ownership: (1) tribal; (2) ancient communal and state ownership, where slavery exists and private property begins; (3) feudal or estate property, where landed property was maintained by serf labour, but craftsmen and merchants emerge as urban classes; (4) the modern system of capitalist production. The motive-force for the

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transition from one type to the next, however, is not the natural desire to improve one’s condition that dominates Scottish accounts, but is instead the struggle between the chief contending classes in any society. As in the ‘Paris Manuscripts’, private property is described as emerging out of the division of labour, and as generating the fragmentation of a communal or general interest. The state is described not as mediating between conflicting interests, but as derived from them; the struggle for the extension of the franchise, central to movements like Chartism, thus merely masked the real struggle of classes within civil society. In the future society ‘there will be no more political power properly so called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society’; instead, there is a clearly Saint-Simonian notion here of ‘politics’ being supplanted by the organization of production, or ‘administration’.

Communism is now defined not as an ideal or ‘a state of affairs to be established’, but as ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’, the proletariat’s conscious desire to supersede the existing system. Communism could not be introduced at an earlier historical stage, but only at the highest stage of modern industrial development, where the existence of a small class of wealthy capitalists and large class of propertyless proletarians is contrasted to the reality of social production and the possibility of ‘modern universal intercourse’, where individuals can achieve an ‘all- rounded’ and ‘free’ development of their potential, where labour becomes the conscious expression of one’s own personality. In one of the most famous passages of their writings, clearly indebted to Fourier in particular, Marx and Engels described the future communist ideal:

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 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, cowherd or critic.

Although there are thus some elements of continuity between the humanist stance of the ‘Paris Manuscripts’ and the historical materialism of the ‘German Ideology’, the breach from Feuerbach also meant that Marx and Engels could not, in theory, use an abstract conception of human nature, particularly communal or species nature, as a critical standpoint. This renunciation of their ‘humanism’, Louis Althusser in particular has suggested, nullified in Marx and Engels’s eyes much of the value of their earlier writings, and meant that no moral or metaphysical standpoint lying outside of actual historical development was any longer possible, which implies, equally, that the ideal communist future could not be described either. In some of Marx’s later writings, however, notably the Grundrisse (written 1857–8), there is brief discussion of the goals of communist society as including ‘attractive labour’ and ‘individual self-realization’ as well as far more free time. It would have been difficult to develop such discussions more fully, however, not only because of constraints imposed by the materialist conception of history, but also because of the rigid distinction between ‘utopian’, or non-revolutionary, unhistorical socialism, and ‘scientific’ socialism, which is imposed on most such discussions after 1848. The fact remains, however, that from both the common-language

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viewpoint and the historical development of a tradition of communal propertyholding largely associated with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Marx is the most influential utopian writer of the modern era.

The fully matured historical and political analysis developed by Marx and Engels from 1843–8 is summarized in the best-known and most powerfully formulated of Marx’s works, the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). Written as Europe witnessed widespread revolutionary outbreaks and the first large-scale publicization of a socialist and communist alternative, it was specifically commissioned by the main existing revolutionary organization, the Communist League. Defining the whole of history in terms of class struggle, the Manifesto offers a brief account of the rise of the modern proletariat, its necessary and increasing impoverishment, the growth of commercial crises, the increasingly cosmopolitan nature of production and internationalization of the working class, and the necessity of a violent revolution to transform society, which needed to occur simultaneously throughout the industrialized societies. It also describes in brief the post-revolutionary programme of the communists, which includes the centralization of credit, communication and transport in the hands of the state, and the abolition of private property in land and the means of production. The form of government supervising this process is termed the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, by which is meant a democratic mechanism by which the proletariat wields power over the whole society. The ultimate aim of this dictatorship, however, was the transition to a communist society in which classes and political power would have been abolished. The exact nature of this interim form of rule, which Marx likened to the existing rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, was nowhere explored at length, though at the time of the Paris Commune he suggested (in The Civil War in France) that the workers’ government there was approximately what he envisioned. In light of the experience of 1848 Marx abandoned the notion of revolution by a small conspiratorial elite in favour of the proletariat as a whole, and also the idea that collaboration with the bourgeoisie was necessary for success (see Class Struggles in France, and the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852). Nonetheless it is usually conceded that Marx did not adequately stress the need for democratic accountability in his discussion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. His mature political theory also greatly underestimated the residual strength of nationalism as a source of proletarian loyalty. And Marx’s conception of the proletarian ‘party’, though intended to describe a movement rather than a disciplined organization as such, paid too little heed to the problem of leadership, which would become extraordinarily important in the Leninist, Stalinist and Maoist variations of the communist movement in the twentieth century. Marx was also accused, notably by his great anarchist antagonist, Michael Bakunin, in Statism and Anarchy (1873), of dictatorial tendencies, being ‘by education and by nature…a Jacobin’, and of planning to impose a centralized and necessarily self-perpetuating dictatorship of intellectuals and elite workers over the working classes as a whole, to the detriment of the peasantry in particular.

From 1849 Marx found himself in exile in London, where he remained until his death on 14 March 1883. His time was primarily spent in the British Museum Reading Room, researching on political economy. During the 1850s he laboured in great poverty, making occasional sums from journalism, notably during the Crimean War, where his strongly anti-Russian sentiments were developed. From the mid-1860s he was the leading

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influence in the International Working Men’s Association, which was founded in London in 1864, and addressed or wrote for it on a wide range of subjects, including education and trade unionism. The effects of Bakunin’s anarchist agitation in particular forced the transfer of the International to New York in 1872, but it was dissolved 4 years later.

The two main intellectual products of Marx’s later years were the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and Capital (vol. 1, 1867). There is some development here of Marx’s theory of commercial crises, amongst other themes. But, if the materialist conception of history is the most important concept of his youth, the theory of surplus value is the great contribution of Marx’s maturity. This describes how the capitalist is able to exploit proletarian labour power in order to generate rent, interest and profit from the amount produced by the worker after a subsistence wage has been paid. By analysing the exact contribution of labour to the value of the product, and assessing the varying costs of training a workforce of both skilled and unskilled workers, the percentage of surplus value exploited at any one time in any one process of production can be determined relatively exactly. Marx did not however draw from this account the conclusion that the labourer should receive the ‘whole produce of labour’, as some earlier socialist and proto- socialist writers, beginning chiefly with Charles Hall, had done. Instead, he insists on the collective social right of the working class as a whole to their aggregate production. The future process of production would continue to reward those engaged in distribution, even though they produced no value as such, because their task was necessary. So too, while the capitalist might perhaps perform a useful task, for instance in supervising production, capital as such added no value to the product.

From the 1860s onwards Marx and Engels began to attract substantial support throughout Europe and beyond, and with the greater circulation of their ideas and development of the international labour movement various questions arose as to the potential modification of the original theory. Engels, who outlived Marx by 12 years, dying on 5 August 1895, had remained with his father’s firm from 1850–69, but moved to London in 1870. His most influential later work was Anti-Dühring (1878), written against a German socialist, which drew a much closer analogy between Marx’s dialectical method and the existence of similar processes of development in nature itself. Engels insisted that three basic laws governed nature, history and human life: the unity of opposites or antitheses, the transformation of quality into quantity, and the negation of the negation. From this work was taken a popular pamphlet, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1883). This led Marxist thought to be described systematically as ‘dialectical materialism’, involving a more intimate association between nature and history than Marx proposes in his main writings. A further development of these themes is in the posthumously published Dialectics of Nature (1927). He also applied an account partly inspired by DARWIN’S theory of natural selection in The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), which was notable particularly for its claim that the development of private property had led to a deterioration of the position of women. One of the problems Marx had to contend with in later years was the suggestion, chiefly put by Russian disciples, who persuaded Marx at least in part, that Russia might establish a communist system based upon the existing semi-feudal system of village communal ownership, thus obviating the need for a bourgeois revolution and lengthy period of capitalist industrialization.