Marxism

I

Introduction

Marxism, social and political theory based on the works of Karl Marx and his followers, associated with the socialist and communist movements.

Marx’s works can be broadly divided into his early philosophical writings (Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844/Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, both written 1844, published 1932, and Die Deutsche Ideologie/The German Ideology, both written 1845-1846, published 1932), his pamphlets (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei/Communist Manifesto, 1848), his analyses of contemporary events (for example, Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Napoleon/The Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852, and Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich/The Civil War in France, 1871), his mature and fundamental works (Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie/Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859), and, above all, Das Kapital (vol. 1, 1867; vols. 2 and 3 published posthumously in 1885 and 1884 respectively). To summarize, let alone explain, this vast and complex theoretical system in a few paragraphs is impossible. The ramifications of the doctrine have included philosophy, economics, history, politics, art, literary criticism, and most of the social sciences. No theorist has been as analysed and discussed in the 20th century and onward as Karl Marx. The reason behind this attention is far from being purely academic. No comparable modern thinker has had as much impact on political parties and movements. Prior to the collapse of communism in Europe at the end of the Cold War, one third of humanity was under regimes purportedly inspired by Marx’s works.

II

Early Works

In these early works Marx was still highly influenced by G. W. F. Hegel and Hegel’s more radical followers, the Young Hegelians. The concept of alienation was a central concept to his Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844. Human beings are said to be alienated if their practical existence contradicts their human essence. For instance, if they are forced into boring, repetitive, and mind-numbing jobs instead of creative ones. Economic scarcity compels human beings to co-operate and devise ways of organizing production in order to satisfy their needs. On the basis of his reading of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), Marx regarded work under capitalism as particularly degrading since the division of labour and the use of machines meant that previously creative work was divided into distinct operations, that human labour became similar to that of machines and, indeed, constantly displaced by the arrival of new machines.

Being compelled to hold on to a dismal situation by the need to earn a living is a further sign of the workers’ alienation since it demonstrates how little control they have over their own life and their own future. The workers are also alienated from what they produce, since the commodity they manufacture is taken away from them and they lose all control over its uses. Thus work under capitalism is unlike that of craft production characteristic of pre-capitalist labour, work that can provide pride to the craftsman. Marx writes in Wage-Labour and Capital (1849) that: “The worker who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc., does he consider his twelve hours spinning, drilling, turning, building, shovelling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary life begins for him when this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed.”

Marx’s concept of alienation was also central to his views on religion. The continuing popularity of religion in the age of rationalism was not evidence of the enduring appeal of superstitious beliefs—as many of Marx’s radical contemporaries believed—but was regarded by Marx as a response to the pain of being alive, to earthly suffering. The lasting attraction of religion had a material basis in an oppressive environment as is made clear by the passage that immediately precedes the famous aphorism about religion being the opium of the people: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances.” In the same text, Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844), he expresses for the first time his belief that the proletariat, that is the industrial working class, was the only truly revolutionary class, a class, he wrote, “that has a universal character because of its universal sufferings…because it is the object of no particular injustice but of injustice in general.”

By then Marx was in exile in France and had come into contact with French revolutionaries. He started to move away from philosophy to study the French and British contribution to political economy. His friendship with Friedrich Engels, who had written a vivid denunciation of the consequences of industrialization in Britain (The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844), was an important element in his intellectual evolution.

III

The Communist Manifesto

With Engels, Marx drafted in 1848 what turned out to be his most widely read work: the Communist Manifesto, commissioned by a small leftist sect of little historical significance known as the Communist League. At that time the meaning of the term “communist” was quite different from that acquired in the 20th century when communism became the official ideology of the Soviet Union. In the mid-19th century communism did not denote a political regime but a somewhat ill-defined and utopian society characterized by communal ownership of the means of production and the absence of political institutions. It was a state of affairs described by Marx in The German Ideology as one 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, herd cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, cowherd, or critic.” It did not entail a centralized state, or the use of repression and political violence.

The Communist Manifesto was a relatively short work of some 12,000 words. It opened with the bombastic claim that: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism”, at a time when the authorities in most of Europe were far more worried by liberal demands for the suffrage, constitutional rights, national independence, or republicanism than by communism. It ended with a memorable rousing call: “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” It provided a historical account of developments since the Middle Ages, criticized rival views of communism, and indicated the main reforms to be pursued in the immediate future including a progressive income tax, abolition of the rights of inheritance, state control over some sectors of the economy such as banks and transport, free education, and abolition of child labour.

Most of the Communist Manifesto, however, was devoted to a celebration of what, on a cursory reading, appeared to be the opponent, namely the industrial bourgeoisie. The merit of capitalism, according to Marx and Engels, was that it “has established the world market” and “given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land.” The bourgeoisie is pushed by the imperative need to expand the markets for its products over the whole surface of the globe: “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” In so doing, the capitalist bourgeoisie has “given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.” In what clearly emerges as the first major statement on globalization, Marx and Engels added that capitalism creates new wants that can be satisfied only by the products of distant lands and climes. “The bourgeoisie”, they continued, thanks to immensely facilitated means of communication, “draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization” and forces them “to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In other words, it creates a world after its own image.” The chief reasons behind Marx’s praise of capitalism was that this was demolishing traditional society and creating one of the chief conditions for communism, namely a society of plenty in which people would be freed from the compulsion of necessity.

IV

The Mature Writings

Marx was laying the foundation for his view of the evolution of society, what he called the materialist conception of history or historical materialism. The key passage where such view was expressed was in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. He explained that the relations of production men enter into are the real basis of society. These relations are independent of their will and conditions social, political, and intellectual life: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

Over this foundation, or base, rises a legal, political, and ideological superstructure that ensures the continuing reproduction of the economic relations. Each historical epoch is characterized by a specific mode of production to which corresponds a particular system of power and, consequently, a ruling class in constant open or hidden conflict with an oppressed class. Thus feudal society is dominated by a feudal mode of production in which the class of landlords extracts a surplus from a rural population bound to the land. This requires also a political and ideological system that holds the serfs in the belief that no other mode of existence is possible. The transition from feudalism to capitalism occurred when the forces of production (labour power and the actual means of production such as machines) could no longer develop within existing relations of production—that is the relations between classes.

For example, capitalist market relations started to develop within feudal society. Eventually feudal relations acted as fetters on the capitalist growth. Capitalism needed an expanding working class but feudalism maintained traditional legal and ideological arrangements that tied serfs to the soil. Capitalism also needed institutional and legal arrangements that would favour its own advance. When an alternative to the feudal social order is both conceivable and possible, a period of social revolution begins paving the way for the development of a capitalist economic structure and a corresponding superstructure. In Marx’s view, the history of humanity has progressed from primitive communism to slave society, then to feudalism, before reaching the present capitalist stage. In turn capitalism paves the way for communism, a society in which there are no classes, no private property, and hence no legal and political superstructure.

The strong deterministic element implicit in this view of history was the basis of subsequent disputes among Marxists. It was reinforced in Marx’s preface to the first edition of the first volume of Das Kapital where he wrote that: “The country that is more developed industrially shows the image of its future to the less developed.” In reality this theory of historical stages remains barely sketched in Marx’s subsequent works, since his main efforts went into analysing capitalist society rather than the mechanism of its collapse or the formation of a socialist or communist society.

Das Kapital should be regarded as a work in progress since Marx only succeeded in seeing the first volume to publication; the other two volumes were unfinished and published after his death. Most of the first volume is devoted to the discussion of the central concepts of capitalism.

In capitalism the fundamental relation, the wage relation, is based on a contract between juridically equal parties: the owners of capital (capitalists) pay the workers (the proletariat) wages in return for an agreed number of working hours. This apparently “fair” contract disguises a real inequality: the capitalists “cheat” the workers by appropriating far more than they pay out in wages and other necessary production costs. This special and statistically unquantifiable appropriation, or “surplus value”, gives the owners of capital great wealth and control over the economic development of society. They thus appropriate not simply wealth but also power. A complex political superstructure, consisting of laws and ideologies of various types, regulates and reinforces these social relations. In effect, by being in charge of the surplus that results from accumulation, capitalists can determine the overall direction of society. However, they cannot do as they please: the commodities produced by capitalism must possess “use-value”, otherwise they would not find buyers, but they must also have exchange-value—they are not needed for the capitalist’s own consumption but only to be exchanged for money. Thus capitalist production is primarily production for exchange and not for needs.

Competition drives inefficient capitalists into bankruptcy and leads to concentration and monopolies. Markets, however, are constantly expanded while techniques of production and forms of exchange are ceaselessly revolutionized. Crises are central to capitalism. Capitalists are driven to try to increase the length of the working day, its intensity, or the productivity of labour to counter the historic tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Workers, if appropriately organized, will offer resistance. Capitalists try to enlarge their markets while paying their workers as little as possible. Yet if they all succeeded, workers’ consumption and consequently their demands for goods would decrease, markets would shrink, and capitalism would enter into a crisis. Crises, however, are part and parcel of capitalist development, a kind of regulatory mechanism that enables the further growth and concentration of capital: “One capitalist always kills many.” Capitalism, moreover, also brings many benefits such as co-operation in the work process, the practical uses of science and, as Marx wrote in the concluding section of Das Kapital, “the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalist regime”, something Marx regarded as a positive development.