Advancing Utopistics

The Three Component Parts and Errors of Marxism

Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317264149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Mohammad H. Tamdgidi is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is the Founding Editor of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge.

Chapter One DICTATORSHIP OF THE “PROLETARIAT”?

[E]ach new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interests as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: 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 from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class. It can do this because, to start with, its interest really is more connected with the common interest of all other non-ruling classes, 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. Its victory, therefore, benefits also many individuals of the other classes which are not winning a dominant position, but only insofar as it now puts these individuals in a position to raise themselves into the ruling class … Every new class, therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously, whereas the opposition of the non-ruling class against the new ruling class later develops all the more sharply and profoundly.

—Marx and Engels, German Ideology

MARX, ENGELS, AND THE THREE PRINCIPAL TENETS OF CLASSICAL MARXISM

In 1886, Frederick Engels credited Karl Marx (d. 1883) for being the primary architect of the new doctrine of social revolution which they had both collaboratively founded.¹ Therefore, we begin first with an exposition of Marx’s life and contributions.²

Marx was born in 1818 into a historical period in Europe that had experienced for some time a paradigmatic shift from the religious toward the scientific world outlooks. Europe was just emerging from the experiences of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Implications of the scientific revolution were being increasingly felt in all facets of life. The material conditions of Europe had already begun to drastically change as a result of the industrial revolution. In terms of general scientific knowledge, some of the greatest scientific discoveries until then had been or were being made about matter, the human body, and their nature and evolution. Socially, however, despite great advances and promises in philosophy, economics, and politics, human misery had increased. While periodic economic crises, growing disillusionments about the promises of capitalism, and revolutionary protests and rebellions were sweeping Europe, the progress of scientific revolution seemed to have stopped at the gates of social science.

The young Marx was raised in a comfortable middle-class, typically patriarchal, but less typically intellectual, Jewish-turned-Christian German family which placed strong stress on children’s school education. His father, both as a a prominent lawyer and an adherent of the French Enlightenment and rationalism, had a strong influence on Marx throughout his childhood and youth. Another strong influence on Marx was his childhood friend and future wife, Jenny Westphalen, who made him interested in French romanticism and utopian socialism. However, it was Marx’s separation from his family to pursue higher education first in Bonn and later in Berlin that substantially contributed to his independent intellectual and social pursuits. In the University of Berlin, Marx abandoned romanticism for the more political and critically charged Young Hegelian idealism.

The convergence of three personal factors proved to be most crucial in determining the future course of Marx’s life: (1) The death of his father in 1838, and his father-in-law in 1842, greatly diminished Marx’s family support and income, suddenly exposing an overspending youth to the possibility of economic hardship and poverty. (2) His associations with the Young Hegelians deeply affected the content and direction of his doctoral research, making his thesis a testimony to not only the depth and the breadth of his intellectual skills, but also the degree to which he saw himself as a child of an earlier historical period of Enlightenment. (3) His association with the politically vulnerable Young Hegelians who were anti-religious and anti-government also cost him the opportunity of a secure academic career, leading him to join his Young Hegelian associates in choosing journalism as a career option, which established a direct link between his rich theoretical skills and views on the one hand, and the practical sociopolitical events of the day on the other. Thus, from the age of twenty-four in 1842, suddenly confronted with economic hardship and no secure means of earning an income, Marx’s lifetime public career of revolutionary theorizing and practice began.

The rest of Marx’s life, during which he elaborated his new doctrine of social revolution, can be traced along three parallel but interacting philosophical, theoretical, and practical paths. The essence of all the findings and activities of Marx along these three directions may be found in a set of eleven theses written by him and later posthumously published by Engels.

In the “Theses on Feuerbach,” written in 1845 by Marx and hailed later by Engels for containing “the germ of the new world outlook,” Marx provided a historical response to the epochal need to make human social inquiry scientific. Marx claimed to have transcended all hitherto idealist and materialist philosophies to build a new, secular, and revolutionary science of social revolution. Reality, Marx argued, had hitherto been conceived by all materialists in its objective aspect, but not also subjectively, thus neglecting the revolutionizing power of the subject. Idealism, although aware of the subjective aspect, had also neglected the revolutionizing power of the subject to change reality since idealism assigned only theoretical significance to the activity of the subject. Human life, Marx further argued, is essentially practical, and the human individual is not an abstract reality, but always a social product, an “ensemble” of historically given concrete social relations. It is only the union, the “coincidence,” of critical theorizing about the changing of circumstances of life with the revolutionizing practical involvement of the subject in life that can bring about real revolutionary transformation. Hence his famous eleventh thesis: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” The union of theory and practice: this was the skeletal essence of the new science of social revolution which Marx founded. The rest of Marx’s life was devoted to giving the new skeleton its flesh and blood on three—philosophical, theoretical, and practical—levels.

Philosophically, Marx set himself the project of transcending the old contemplative materialism and the old idealist dialectic, as advanced by their most recent representatives in German classical philosophy, Ludwig Feuerbach and G. W. Friedrich Hegel respectively. He sought to establish a new ontology in which the dialectic of the object and the subject is systematically restored and recognized. This of course implied, on the epistemological domain, a new appreciation of the significance of practice in the human cognitive process. From the application of the “new” materialism and the materialistically “inverted” dialectics of the new philosophical doctrine, the “materialist conception of history” was derived: before human beings can engage in politics, law, science, literature, art, war, etc., they must first feed, cloth, and shelter themselves. Development of human history is a result of the dialectic between human productive powers and social relations constituting the mode of production of material life, which in turn broadly determines the intellectual and legal-political superstructures. This dialectic leads to periodic eras of social revolution bringing about ever newer modes of production in human history. Various forms of class society correspond only to stages of development in human “prehistory,”³ to be followed by an advanced classless, communist society in which the “free development of each will be a condition for the free development of all.”

All this, however, was regarded by Marx as only a “guiding thread” for the important scientific investigation at hand involving new theoretical insights into the nature of modern capitalist society.

Theoretically, Marx set about to study the past through the specific analysis of the dominant mode of production in the present: i.e., the capitalist society. The “guiding thread” of his studies as outlined in the preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy ([1859]/1978) focused Marx’s attention on the study of the economic foundation of capitalism, which he pursued through a critical investigation of the classical theories of political economy and of the capitalist economy where it had most developed by the nineteenth century, i.e., in England. Marx’s investigations resulted in the discoveries of the law of surplus value and the inevitable tendency of the rate of profit to fall due to the inner logic of capital itself. Capitalism dug its own grave. Claiming to have proven the transitory nature and the inevitable demise of the capitalist mode of production due to its own inner laws of motion and by the hands of a proletarian class continually created by capital itself as its own “grave-diggers,” Marx established the theoretical foundations for his political, “practical-revolutionary,” activities centered around the revolutionary potential and historical mission of the proletariat.

Marx devoted his energies to the concrete analysis of and practical involvement in the experience of working-class struggles and formulated the doctrine of class struggle as the driving force of history. Collaboratively drawing up and publishing in 1848 (with his lifelong friend, Engels) the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx stressed the role played by class struggles in past history, and during the present epoch during which they had become increasingly more simplified as a fundamental confrontation between the capitalists and the working class. Giving due credit to the bourgeoisie in its fight against the feudal system and in spreading the capitalist mode of production to every corner of the globe, Marx demonstrated the limits of capital’s own revolutionary agenda. The modern industrial working class then was hoisted as a vanguard class, growing in number, having no property in and control over the means of production, increasingly confronting capital, forming trade unions, gaining self-consciousness as a class, and organizing itself into a political party with its own program and agenda.

The key “scientific” novelty introduced by Marx into the strategies and tactics of the workers’ struggles—an empirical result of his earlier philosophical thesis on the revolutionary significance of the coincidence of objective circumstances and subjective critical-practical activity—was the view that revolutions are not voluntary affairs but that revolutionary situations are products of the coming together of objective and subjective social conditions. It was the coincidence of these conditions that could bring about the possibility of the seizure of political power by the vanguard working class, of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a class over the bourgeoisie, and the implementation of a set of short-term and long-term programs that would set the material conditions for the creation of a classless, communist society.

Learning from the lessons of French revolutionary experience and French (especially utopian) socialism and later the experience of the Paris Commune uprising in 1871, Marx became convinced of the necessity of overthrowing the bourgeois state in the revolutionary process, and, as a result, also of the necessity of violence during workers’ revolutionary movements toward achievement of a communist society.

When considering Marx’s contributions to the development of scientific socialism as generally outlined above, the part played by Frederick Engels can hardly be ignored. Marx himself credited Engels for having independently arrived at similar conclusions as he did himself especially in regard to the economic contradictions of capitalism and the historical mission of the working class.⁴ It is necessary, therefore, to treat Engels’s works as integral parts of the classical Marxist tradition.

Engels was born in 1820 into a German textile manufacturer’s family, deeply religious and characteristically apolitical. His father, wishing to train Frederick, his eldest child, to be in charge of the family business when he grew up, exerted particular control over his school education, insisting—against Engels’s wishes to study literature—on his entering the family business during his last high school years. His strong reactions against both the business culture and also the church can therefore be probably traced to the negative parental—especially paternal—pressures exerted on him. When his father sent him to another town to continue his business apprenticeship, Engels used the freedom thus provided to indulge in his own intellectual, social, and political interests. Later he extended this freedom by volunteering for military training in Berlin where in his spare time he frequented the University of Berlin and soon became very close to its circle of Young Hegelians. Here he first met Marx, a journal editor at the time.

Engels’s early radicalism and exposure to communist views about the imminent demise of British capitalism and the revolutionary potential of the working class soon solidified his radical and revolutionary aspirations, leading him to enter his father’s factory branch in Manchester mainly in order to study capitalism first hand. In Manchester, Engels wrote an outline of a critique of political economy which later played a crucial role not only in attracting Marx’s attention to economic matters, but in launching the two men’s lifelong friendship and collaboration with one another. Engels’s research on the conditions of the working class in England later provided crucial empirical links between Marx’s theoretical work and the realities of British capitalism. It was from this point on that Engels’s collaboration with Marx took serious literary and political-practical form.

Engels’s contribution to Marx’s work encompasses all the philosophical, theoretical, and practical spheres of the doctrine of social revolution they collaboratively founded. Critiquing traditional philosophy, Engels directly participated in the formulation of Marx’s materialist conception of history through the writing of an extensive treatise (posthumously published as The German Ideology) against the views of their Young Hegelian associates. Later, after Marx’s death, Engels made great efforts at defending, systematizing, and popularizing the philosophical foundations of the new paradigm. His critique of the views advanced by Dühring, commentaries on Ludwig Feuerbach, and also extensive research on the dialectics of nature are among the works Engels accomplished during this period.

Theoretically, Engels’s sources of data on and insights into the workings of industrial capitalism proved to be crucial in the ongoing research carried out by Marx on capitalism. Closely editing Marx’s drafts, Engels was the only one who could decipher Marx’s illegible handwriting, which proved to be crucial when he took up the task and successfully accomplished the publication of the later volumes of Marx’s theoretical work, Capital. Engels also complemented Marx’s theoretical work on political economy with a systematic research on historical issues such as the origin of the family, private property, and the state.

Practically alongside Marx, Engels produced the first draft of the Manifesto of the Communist Party and took up many political and polemical tasks, reflected not only in his organizational efforts but also in his journalistic articles and publications about the revolutionary experiences of the working class in Germany and other European nations. Using Marx’s signature, and partly to support Marx financially, Engels published numerous articles on various issues in several international newspapers. After Marx’s death Engels acted as the most prominent advisor to European socialist parties.

The fact is that during his lifelong collaboration with Marx, Engels provided crucial support, not only organizationally, intellectually, and politically, but also financially to Marx’s efforts in building their new scientific doctrine of social revolution. From the beginning, therefore, the works of Marx and Engels were closely intertwined. Although one may find differences of views or emphases between the two founders in elaborating or presenting their world outlook, there is no evidence in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves, published in their lifetime or later, that would indicate they expressed a fundamental disagreement on any major aspects of their work. This is crucial to point out since many Marxists later took the works of Marx and Engels as a single body of philosophical, theoretical, and practical work, treating it as a singular guide in their revolutionary work.

To sum up, Marx’s and Engels’s doctrine of social revolution consists of three principal tenets:

1. Method: The Materialist Dialectical Method: Marx and Engels stressed that their doctrine of social revolution was not a sum of dead or immortal theoretical or practical constructs or dogmas, but a scientific guide, a union of theory and practice, a method for studying and making social revolutions. This method, which came to be known as the materialist dialectical method, was developed and applied by Marx and Engels duri...