Revolutionary Ideas Of Karl Marx

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• Publisher: Bookmarks E Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781905192687
• eBook ISBN: 9781909026186
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Karl Marx is one of the handful of people who have fundamentally changed the way people see the world. His ideas have always been controversial, misunderstood, attacked and even dismissed. The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx rescues the revolutionary tradition of Marx and demonstrates conclusively the relevance of his ideas today for everyone who wants an end to poverty, economic crisis and war and to see humanity progress. Now back in print in a handy, pocket-sized edition, Alex Callinicos's classic text is a vital reference for any student of Marxism.

CHAPTER 7

WORKERS’ POWER

The most basic proposition of Marxism is that capitalism creates the material and social conditions of communism. The abolition of classes is possible only where capitalist relations of production have lifted the productivity of labour to a level where scarcity can be abolished. We have seen how these relations come to act as a fetter on the productive forces, giving rise to a regular, cyclical succession of boom and slump.

Another way of putting this is to say that capitalism makes communism both historically possible and historically necessary. But there is more to it than that. Capitalism brings into being the social force which will overthrow it and abolish classes. This force is the working class.

As Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto:

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labour…The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable (CW vi 496).

The downfall of capital will not take place automatically, as some misreadings of this passage have it. It depends on the organisation, consciousness, and activity of the working class. In 1879 Marx and Engels summed up their politics in these words:

For almost 40 years we have stressed the class struggle as the immediate driving power of history, and in particular the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution. When the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class is conquered by the working classes themselves (SC 327).

This idea of the self-emancipation of the working class is at the heart of Marx’s thought, as we have already seen. Hal Draper has contrasted the ‘two souls of socialism’. One, that of ‘socialism from above’, sees change coming about as a result of the activity of enlightened leaders who control the state, and use it to introduce reforms on behalf of the workers. Social Democratic and Communist parties all over the world have espoused such a view of socialism, whether they see members of parliament or the party as the actual agent of change. Marx, however, stood for ‘socialism from below’, for workers liberating themselves through their own activity.

GRAVEDIGGERS OF CAPITALISM

‘The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes,’ Marx wrote (CW vi 212). In other words, the overthrow of capitalism will not lead to the establishment of a new form of class society. Rather, it will be a preliminary to the creation of a communist society in which exploitation and class antagonism no longer exist.

The working class’s capacity to abolish classes arises from its position within capitalist relations of production. We have seen how capitalism tends to create the collective worker, that is, to bring together workers into larger and larger units of production where everyone’s labour is dependent on that of the others. Marx believed that the course of capitalist development would force workers to band together in order to resist their exploitation:

Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, their common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance – combination. This combination always has a double aim, that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in turn unite for purpose of repression, and in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages. This is so true that English economists are amazed to see the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages in favour of associations, which, in the eyes of these economists, are established solely in favour of wages. 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 domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have pointed out only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle (CW vi 210-211).

Marx believed, like the other socialists of his day, that a society based on association, on sharing and cooperation, was the alternative to capitalism, which is founded on competition. Communism was, for Marx, the rule of the associated producers. The Utopian socialists, however, believed that such an association would spring from an essentially moral commitment, by all the classes of presentday society, to do away with capitalism. Marx, on the other hand, argued that communism would be the result of the material interests and struggles of workers within the process of production. ‘We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present stage of things’ (CW v 49).

The pressure of capitalist exploitation forces workers to organise and act collectively. Only thus can they tap the source of their real power, which springs from their position within capitalist relations of production. The self-expansion of value depends on their labour, and they have, therefore, the capacity to paralyse the whole system of production. To use that capacity, however, they must band together. Solidarity is the very basic principle of every working class action. Without it, every strike would fail.

So it is the place that the working class occupies within the capitalist system of exploitation which gives it the power to abolish classes. Capitalism socialises the labour process, vastly increasing the size of the means of production, making them dependent on the combined labour of the collective worker. These instruments of production cannot be operated by individuals. Equally, the working class can only seize the means of production collectively, as a class. It doesn’t make any sense to talk about sharing a factory out among the workers, breaking it up into little bits – if that was done, it would cease to be a factory, and all its benefits would be lost.

The decisive role which workers play in the struggle against capitalism does not arise from their being the most oppressed section of society. On the contrary, there may be others in a worse position. For example, Marx points out that there are sections of the industrial reserve army, what he calls the ‘stagnant element’, ‘vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in short the actual lumpenproletariat’, ‘the demoralised, the ragged, and those unable to work’, who are permanently excluded from the process of production, and are worse off than the rest of the working class (C i 797). It does not follow that they are more revolutionary. On the contrary, just because they are never subject to the discipline of capitalist production they are more liable to be picked up by reactionary movements able to exploit their misery. The lumpenproletariat’s ‘conditions of life’, Marx predicted in the Manifesto, ‘prepare it…for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue’ (CW vi 494).

Thus Louis Bonaparte formed in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution the Society of 10 December, a private army which was to help him to power as Napoleon III. Similarly, the unemployed are always fertile recruiting grounds for fascist movements because they are no longer subject to the pressure of capitalist exploitation which leads workers to band together against the boss.

But if misery is not enough to make a social group the motive force for communism, neither is exploitation. The peasantry, as a class, are exploited. Surplus labour is extracted from them in the form of rent to landowners, interest to moneylenders, and taxes to the state. However, Marx argues that this does not make them a revolutionary class. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he shows how the French peasantry provided Napoleon III with the passive support which enabled him to present himself as an arbiter between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat:

The smallholding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse… Their field of production, the small-holding, admits of no division of labour in its cultivation, no application of science and, therefore, no diversity of development, no variety of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient; it itself directly produces the major part of its consumption and thus acquires its means of life more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A smallholding, a peasant and his family; alongside them another smallholding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these make up a village, and a few score of villages make up a département. In this way, the great mass of the French nation is formed by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far 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 organisation among them, they do not form a class (CW xi 187).

Marx is not arguing that the peasantry can never play a positive role in social and political struggles. The three great revolutions of modern times, France 1789, Russia 1917, and China 1949, all saw the smallholding peasantry make a decisive contribution to their victory. But because the relations of production confine peasants’ horizons to the limits of their smallholding, their village, at best their province, their uprisings have a parochial character. The local landlord is lynched, his manor house burned down, and his estate divided among the peasants. And things improve, until the army arrives, executes a few ringleaders, and restores the landowner’s son to his inheritance.

It is only when peasant risings coincide with a confrontation between the ruling class and another class which is challenging their power that they can play a part in transforming society. Peasants can become a national political force when they are led by another class. In France in 1789 that class had been the bourgeoisie. Marx believed that, with the advent of capitalism, the working class could weld the discontent of the peasantry into a national movement against bourgeois society. The conclusion of his analysis of the French peasantry in the Eighteenth Brumaire was that ‘the peasants find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task is the overthrow of the bourgeois order’ (CW xi 191).

Again, in The Civil War in France, Marx declared that ‘the Commune was perfectly right in telling the peasants that “its victory was their only hope”,’ and asked how the peasants’ traditional loyalty to Bonapartism, which had been betrayed completely by Napoleon III, could ‘have withstood the appeal of the Commune to the living interests and urgent wants of the peasantry’ (CWF 75, 77). Marx was, therefore, in favour of the workers’ movement seeking to win the peasantry to their side by appealing to their material interests. But only the working class itself could overthrow capitalism, and, in liberating itself, also free all the other exploited and oppressed sections of society.

Marx and Engels learned from the Utopian socialists, and especially from Fourier, a bitter and unremitting hatred of sexual oppression, the subjection of women to men. The Communist Manifesto contains a savage attack on the bourgeois family, and Engels sought to show in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that the oppression of women was bound up with the emergence of the monogamous family, of classes, and of the ‘special bodies of armed men’ whose duty it is to defend the interests of property. The emancipation of women, he concluded, was inseparable from that of the working class.

There are a number of defects in Engels’ analysis. It is now clear that sexual inequality predates the emergence of class antagonisms, and its origins may have had more to do with factors such as wars between tribal societies than Engels had thought. Moreover, he and Marx were wrong to predict that the development of capitalism would lead to the disappearance of the working class family.

Nevertheless, their conclusion still stands. The family, in the form in which it has existed since the triumph of industrial capitalism, is based on the isolation and confinement of married women to the home. The condition of the housewife is one of the most alienated in bourgeois society. The separation of women in the home makes it difficult for them to organise and act collectively. One of the most important developments of capitalism this century has been the way in which it has drawn women into the workforce, so that two workers in every five in Britain today are women, and most working class women spend a considerable portion of their lives at work. In the workplace women can acquire the collective organisation and power to liberate themselves, in conjunction with the men with whom they work, who are subject, like them, to capitalist exploitation.

PARTY AND CLASS

The working class, by virtue of its position within capitalist relations of production, is the only class capable of installing a classless society. The obvious difficulty, in Marx’s day as in our own, is that the mass of workers accept the continued existence of capitalism as inevitable. It is daily instilled into them, from childhood onwards, that working people are incapable of running society. This task, they are told at school, in the press, and on television and radio, must be left to the experts – to managers, civil servants, members of parliament and trade union officials. The workers’ role is to accept orders from above. How can this lack of workers’ confidence in their ability to transform society be broken down?

As Marx put it: how does the working class become a class ‘for itself’, that is, a class conscious of its position and interests in capitalist society, and its historical role in overthrowing it? His answer was that workers become aware of their interests as a class through the class struggle itself. Through their daily battles with capital in the process of production workers acquire the consciousness, confidence and organisation necessary if they are to play a revolutionary role.

This takes us back to the notion which we found in the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology that ‘in revolutionary activity the changing of oneself coincides with the changing of circumstances’ (CW v 214). Driven to engage in the class struggle by the exploitation they experience in the process of production, workers begin to transform both themselves and society.

This conception of revolutionary change meant that Marx had a very positive attitude towards strikes, and generally to the economic class struggle through which workers organised in trade unions to seek to improve their conditions within the framework of capitalism. This again set Marx apart from the other socialists of his day. He wrote of them that, when confronted with ‘strikes, combinations and other forms in which the proletarians carry out before our eyes their organisation as a class, some are seized with real fear and others display a transcendental disdain’ (CW vi 211). Such an attitude is still to be found among socialists today, some of whom are contemptuous of workers who go on strike for higher wages, and dismiss them for acting with self-interested and ‘economistic’ motives.

Marx was profoundly hostile to this disdain of workers’ struggles. In Wages, Price and Profit he challenged the widespread belief, advanced in this case by...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• FOREWORD
• KEY TO REFERENCES
• INTRODUCTION (1995)
• INTRODUCTION (1983)
• LIFE OF A REVOLUTIONARY
• SOCIALISM BEFORE MARX
• RICARDO, HEGEL AND FEUERBACH
• MARX’S METHOD
• HISTORY AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE
• CAPITALISM
• WORKERS’ POWER
• MARX TODAY
• FURTHER READING
• INDEX