Introduction
Marx & Engels
This introduction will be in two parts; first there will be a shortened summary of Marx’s life, followed by a list of some Marxian Concepts that offer an introduction to the thought of Marx and Engels.
The list may be added to later
The life of Karl Marx
This outline will be taken from the much longer summary contained in Evans (1975).
Karl Marx (1818 to 1883) was born in Trier the centre of the Moselle region in the Prussian Rhineland. His parents were Jewish, but his father had to change his religion in order to keep his legal post in the Prussion Civil Service. Karl was deeply attached to his father and always carried an old photo of him. The family lived next door to the Westphalen family, (15) that contained a daughter Jenny whom Karl was to marry, much later.
As he grew up Karl attended school and proved himself to be of sound intelligence. By the end of his school career Marx had been exposed to the ideals of 1789, a rational liberalism, and the ideas of Fourier and Saint Simon.
Marx next attended the University of Bonn, (16) and caused his father some anxiety as Karl’s main occupation there was that of writing poetry. A year later Marx moved to Berlin and wrote to his Father that he was genuinely studying Law, with some secondary detours into poetry and Philosophy. His studies included the work of Hegel; and by 1837 he had become a Hegellian.
In Berlin he met Bruno Bauer, and he joined the Doctorklub, a forerunner of the Young Hegellians. Marx shared most of the Young Hegelians preoccupations, and began to study for his doctoral thesis 1n late 1838, after his father’s death. (17)
His thesis was completed in March 1841, and the next month the University of Jena made him a Doctor of Philosophy. However Bauer was dismissed from his Bonn post for irreligious views, and this ended Marx’s hope of a university career.
Instead he turned to Journalism writing for Rheinische Zeiting, (17) becoming the editor in October 1842. He avoided contributions that would be seen as socialist or communist. But his own views on wood theft and the economic plight of Moselle wine growers led to the ceased publication of the newspaper in March 1843.
In June of that year he married Jenny Westphalen, and the two moved to Kreusnach for a summer interlude. Marx’s time there allowed him to look into the literature on the French revolution, and also he read extensively on political theory. (18)
In October of that year he moved to Paris to edit the Deutsch FranzosischeJarbuch, along with Arnold Ruge a radical publicist. In his first months there he furthered his knowledge of the French revolution, and he abandoned his critique of Hegel’s political thought that he had recently started. He also learned of class struggles in in France and in Britain; he as well saw links between class struggle, of successive economic formations, and the economic role pf classes in production.
He, as well, began to study political economy and in the summer of 1844 he wrote his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and began to appreciate the communist point of view, and to his synthesis of ideas he saw the relation of the new social class – the industrial proletariat.
The relationship of Marx and Ruge became strained as the their journal came under stress and they parted in August 1844.(19)
But in the same month the crucial meeting Marx and Engels (1820 95) took place. They had met before in a short and cool meeting, but this time they both appreciated the other and began a collaboration that lasted nearly 40 years. Their working relationship became extremely close. Engels – through a Jarbuch article he had written, his personal knowledge, his writing for Robert Owen and his collection of material for his forthcoming ’Conditions of the Working Class in England in1844’ – swayed Marx’s attention to economics.(20)
Their collaboration began very quickly. Engels had knowledge of the conditions of the working class, about which Marx was only theorising about; Engels too knew about money markets, trade trends and industrial conditions.
Still, there was not much collaboration when Marx wrote the ‘Holy Family (November 1844), but it changed when ‘The German Ideology’ (1845) was produced and much of it was in Engels hand writing.
Engels returned to work in Manchester from 1850 to 1870, but the two of them exchanged 1350 letters, and visited one another regularly (20).
Marx was now writing for the’ New York Daily Tribune’ and Engels wrote some of the early material as Marx was unable at first to write in English. Engels also stepped in when Marx’s only son Edgar died in 1855. They also exchanged letters regarding advice on Marx’s ‘Critique of Political Economy (1859), and Capital1. The reverse also happened when Marx examined Engels writing of ‘Anti-During’ (1877) which was a systematic description of the ‘Marxist’ position.
After Marx’s death Engels assembled Capital 11 and 111 from Marx’s manuscripts. For long time Engels was Marx’s only audience. Marx wrote a pamphlet on the Paris Commune, and he became known as the Red Doctor (20). Despite the publication of Capital in 1867, it was not until the publication of ‘Anti-During’ ten years later that Marx’s views became somewhat well known, and of course this was via Engels. (20)
Evans then describes Marx’s efforts in February 1845 at Working Class Organisation. He had been expelled from France, and so went to Brussels for three years. Engels had introduced Marx to his contacts in the Chartist movement and the London Branch of the League of the Just, a secret German artisan organisation,
Marx decided to set up a network of communist corresponding committees. The Brussels committee was set up in February 1846, with a purpose of maintaining a continuous interchange of letters with the League of the Just, and with other fraternal associations in Western Europe (Wheen, 103). At the same time Marx set to work persuading prominent socialists to take part.
Unfortunately, the general response to Marx’s scheme was very disappointing; only a few contacts were made in Silesia, Kiel and Cologne. No new important contacts were made. Marx had hoped that a wide circulation of new socialist theory might be made; especially his own theory of ’The German Ideology’.
The only hope for what Marx called the ‘real movement’, became the left wing of the Chartists, and the London and Paris organisation of ‘The Just’, mainly made up of German artisans.
Others, for example Cabet and Weitling, appealed to Christian Sentiment – clearly missing the point. When in Brussels Marx and Weitling clashed. For Marx the main theoretical problems were ‘artisan communism’ and ‘philosphical communism’ – but he did have some support in thr Just for his doctrine and his search for a genuine workers organisation to convert (25).
Marx’s efforts paid of in June 1847 when at the congress of the Just became the Communist League. (25) The League began with a three tier organisation with the central committee at the centre, and rules as to whom members of the tiers could communicate with – this arrangement was seen to be ultra democratic (26).
There followed a confused period, as a revolution was taking place in Europe. The organisation became more hierarchical in the December that followed the June arrangements.
Marx and Engels finished the Communist Manifesto soon after. But in the May that followed the organisation was dissolved by Marx, the reason being that as the revolution progressed, more civil liberties were put in place. Thus there became no reason for the secret League as it was now possible to operate openly (28).
Later in June 1849 Marx was ordered to leave Paris, from where he arrived in London, where he rejoined the Communist League. Marx was of the opinion that a successful revolution depended on some kind of economic crisis.
In March 1850, when the revolution had been defeated, Marx and others published an Address saying, among other opinions, that the revolution must be made permanent until the workers had conquered state power. But although the address was a Marxian based paper, there were also Blanqui contributions of a different nature (30).
Marx gave up League work in January 1851, and spent his time refuting police forgeries and finally wrote “Revelation of the Communist trial in Cologne”. After this he spent the rest of his life in England.
The 1850s were a difficult time for Marx and his family. Three of their six children died in those years 1850, 1852 and 1855; and a still born child died in 1856. Marx commented he could not call a doctor as he had no money for medicine; in addition for 8 to 10 days he fed the family on just bread and potatoes. In addition the female maid servant had a baby by Marx, although Engels claimed it was his.
The family were evicted in 1850 for non payment of rent and then spent 6 years in two squalid rooms in Dean St., Soho. A small legacy from the death of the mother of Marx’s wife allowed them to move in 1856.
Their only small income came from Marx’s work for the New York Daily Tribune. But Marx was determined to continue his theoretical work. Evans writes that this period of poverty and hard work were major contributors to the ill health that Marx suffered in his later years. (32)
Throughout this period Engels was able to send irregular funds to the family. Then in 1869 he was able to settle an income of £350 pounds a year to Marx and his family.
In these difficult circumstances Marx pressed on with his concerns; his most important occupations became writing journalism, writing Capital 1, and organising the International Workingmens Association (IWA).
Marx then spent his time in The British Museum reading room from 9am until 7pm. While trying to progress Capital1, he also had to spend time in his Journalistic activities, which paid him a small amount of money.
Marx set himself an enormous task; in addition to the above he undertook the writing of a history of economic theories.
As he progressed, in 1865 he wrote that he had three more chapters to write for Capital 1. Part 1 of the book incorporated the argument of ‘A contribution to the Critique of Political economy’; he also drew upon his writing in the Grundrisse (34 -35).
Then before publishing Capital 1, he completed the first drafts of Capital 2 and 3, which were to be published by Engels 1n 1885 and 1893. He was also working on a fourth book now, on the history of Economic theory. Marx then managed to publish the first Volume of Capital in 1867, in German.
In the late 1860s Marx began his efforts of 8 years to support and progress the IWA. The revival of the organisation owed mostly to the efforts of Ferdinand Lassalle; and Marx had played no part in this.
Eventually (37) Marx was to write the Inaugural Address of the IWA, where he paints a picture of the working class from 1848 to 1864. The workers had managed to push through a victory of the Ten Hours Act (37).
The co-operative movement had also pushed forward, but Marx knew that the working class must realise the international nature of their struggle and the need to conquer political power.(37)
The Address by Marx could be interpreted by those with quite different views of socialism; there follows a list of contents shown by Evans (37).
The abolition of Class Rule
The call to Political Action
The Immense benefits from the Ten Hours Act
Marx began with caution regarding the IWA; he was happy to accept incremental moves towards a general theoretical programme. He also used his position to draft most of the Central Councils official documents, and Marx was able to give them a slant of his own. (38)
Evans at this general point decided to cover the three main issues which would eventually divide the IWA.
These issues were collectivisation, political action, and the organisation of the IWA itself. We start then with collectivisation.
This issue was put back until the Brussels Congress of 1868. The congress decided that mines, quarries, railways, arable land, forests, canals, roads tekgraphs and other means of communication should all be included as collective property. But most of the collectivists at Brussels though that collectivism should be controlled by workers cooperatives, rather than by state control.
But the congress in Basle in1869 confirmed that land should become collective property.
However a major divergence emerged at Basle. A small group argued that no collectivist system had been put forward without proving authoritarian, hierarchical and centralised. Bakunin dismissed this worry arguing that collective ownership of land would end the political and juridicial state. This view was also dismissed by Eccarius who argued the state could be reformed when the working class rose to political power.
Marx argues that this was an issue of the juridical superstructure, an effect of the economic base.
This all raised the problem of political action and the role of the state. Bur both the Geneva and Lausanne congresses unanimously supported political action; but none of the IWA congresses had committed itself to any specific political activity. (40)
The relation of political action and the social movement of the working class was put off until the Mainz congress in 1870. But the Franco-Prussian war broke out and Mainz could not take place. (40)
Evans covers the remaining years of the IWA in great detail, therefore here his account will be severely shortened.
As the war progressed Napoleon 111 was captured, Paris became under siege by the Prussians, and the Paris Commune took place. After several months the Commune was defeated and crushed in ’bloody week’ where a multitude of killings took place.
Many saw this as the end of the revolutionary tradition that originated in about 1789. But Marx saw this differently; he saw the Commune as a resistance to the restoration of the monarchy, and that that the Commune was a portent for the future as the first time in world history that a working class government held the reins of power. (40)
But problems became evident in the IWA. Marx argued that exiting translations of the rules were garbled in many places, and that the French version had falsified certain formulations. It was decided to publish official versions of the rules in the various languages necessary. But many members took issue with the decisions taken at the London Congress, and this led to many more others seeing political action and organisation as inextricably linked. At the Geneva Congress no provision was made for the co-option of new members. But at Lausanne the council was allowed to add new members as they saw fit. At Basle (1869), the council was given powers to admit or refuse new sections, to suspend sections from membership, and to adjudicate in disputes between existing section. Bakuninsaw this as opportunity.
The London congress of 1871 did not change these rules. But there arose a division from those who favoured political action and those who wanted nothing to do with capitalist politics. And this division became between authoritarian centralisers and anti-authoritarian decentralisers.
In this context arose a real conflict between Bakunin and Marx. The two men held completely different political positions.
Bakunin ‘ believed in the necessity of a universal revolution’ (42). This would include the urban working class, the peasants, the lunpen proletariat, the unemployed and the unemployable. He gave a leading role to disaffected students and intellectuals; and the revolution would begin not in the advanced counries but in the poor nations of southern Europe.
He detested what he called the state centred authoritarian approach of Marx, and saw the intermediate stage of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat controlling the state for socialism as essentially authoritarian.
Yet he was wrong to call Marx authoritarian, and Marx and Engels had told people that the Paris Commune was an example of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
But Bakunin pressed on. He a few followers had founded The International Alliance of Social Democracy. At his second attempt in February 1869 he was accepted into the IWA; but in the event only the Geneva section was enrolled.
It is argued that Bakunin saw the IWA as forming a number of concentric rings, as follows; the IWA, the Alliance inside the IWA, the International Brotherhood inside the Alliance, and Bakunins own directorate at the cente of all the other rings. He is also quoted as saying that he and Marx would be engaged in a ‘life and death struggle’.
Marx was convinced the IWA was subject to internal disruption, and he warned the German sections of it. (43)
There followed a period of internal struggle in the IWA. The General Council, made up of the same people for five years, regarded itself as the legitimate head of the IWA.
Their views became the official theory and other views were taken to be in effect heresy. They held that the IWA should return to the autonomy of the sections, and the General Council to is role as ‘a simple correspondence and statistical bureau’ (44). This was put out ia circular which ended as follows,
“Future society should be none other than the universalisation of the organisation which the International has given itself. How can a free and egalitarian society arise from an authoritarian organisation?” ( 44)
The circular, together with a counterblast from Marx, set the terms of the debate in 1872 and for many years afterwards. Marx had decided to discredit Bakunin. A committee was appointed to ear Engels charge against Bakunin. It went like this,
Bakunins Alliance, supposedly dissolved in 1869, had continued as a secret organsatio within the IWA.
This organisation aimed at imposing a sectarian programme on the IWA.
The IWA is composed of socialists of varied shades of opinion, but the IWA has a programme wide enough to accommodate them all.
But the secret Alliance working against the basic priciples of the IWA is not acceptable.
All IWA members are equal under the rules; but he Alliance thinks in terms of two castes – the initiated and the unanitiated, the aristocracy and the plebs; the latter to be led by the others using an unknown organisation.
As a result Bakunin and a defender of him were both expelled from the IWA. Although Marx and Engels had saved the IWA from Bakunin, Evans argues (45) that it was at the cost of destroying the organisation.
Engels created some consternation when he suggested the General Council should move to New York. His reasoning included the fact that the next congress was to be in Switzerland, where was sure to be a Bakuninist majority that would give them another year of ‘even greater stupidities’. And he added that party dissensions in London as a major reason for moving elsewhere.
Marx had been supported by the Blanquists, which he felt he could do without as they had not given up their’ barricadology’ from their Commune days. The English members of the General Council had grown lukewarm towards Marx, such that he could not count on Council support for his views.
At this time Marx was suffering from some ill health, and we wanted to get on with the completion of Capital 1. There had been a Congress in the Hague in September 1872, which Marx saw as ‘the end of my slavery’, he saw himself as a free man who could accept no more administrative duties.
The council heard Engels reasoning, thought they could not move ethe next Congress to Paris or Brussels on the grounds of security; they accepted that Switzerland would play into Bakuuinists hands. So they opted for New York which was safe from European Governments and destructive elements; and there was rapid industrial growth in USA.
Evans then assesses the reasons for the end of the IWA. The move to New York was not a cause he finds. Iwa comprised many different and discordant elements. The English wanted for their Trades Unionism, namely the Franchise (1867), legal security (1871) and an end to strike breaking by the import of overseas workers. The French had more limited wants, and the Commune meant the end of the IWA in France; regarding Germany, Marx was bitterly disappointed; they had a purely platonic relation of German workers to the IWA, members from Spain and Italy merely wanted to reinforce the traditional artisan skill base of the IWA.
Evans notes (46) that this was a difficult situation for Marx to work in. Marx’s aims were not those of the IWA working class leaders. As noted above the issue of collective property and political action concealed deep divisions of opinion.
In the context of post Commune repression Marx felt that the mediatory role of the General Council was not adequate, and that a clear political attitude was needed. Marx, however, made an error in refusing to allow that the new commitment to independent working class parties was only a matter of principle that had not been decided at a congress. This gave Bakunin and his followers an edge in their search for support.
Indeed at the congress at Rimini the Italian delegates boycotted the proceedings,and a number of delegates favourable to Marx prevented the issue from being decisive at the Hague.
These issues, Evans feels, probably accelerated the decline of the IWA, already apparent before the Commune.
In sum,
“Liebknecht was probably right that an international organisation was premature, given different labour movements in the different countries that made a unified international direction or common programme to much to expect.” (46).
After all this Evans covers Marx’s last ten or eleven years (46 to 49). He feels that Marx, especially after the Paris Commune and the Hague Conference, retreated into family life and published nothing more of economic consequence. His last years were dogged by persistent illness; this was one reason, now with no pressing financial worry, but the sheer complexity of his task – the writing of the English version of Capital 1 finally published in 1887. He was unable to publidh Caapital 11 and 111, and he left that task to Engels.
But he always seemed to pursue different lines of study; this time he set about learning Russian because he tool a keen interest in Russian economic conditions. He also kept up with working class politics and saw revolutionary possibilities in countries that had yet to become capitalist.
He did write a critique of the Gotha Programme of the SPD in 1875; he also wrote a circular letter on certain tendencies in German Social democracy; he wrote too part of the drafting of the first Marxian political programme in France in 1880; and also drafts concerning Russian developments. He wrote to an interesting questionnaire for ‘La Revue Socialist’, also in 1880.
Marx also wrote a chapter for Engels ‘Anti-Duhring’ and a few articles attacking Gladstones Russian policy in 1877.
He applied in 1874 for British Citizenship, so that he could travel in Europe with more safety. But he was turned down, with no reason given.
After this things began to draw together. The Marx family no longer lived in poverty and hardship. Marx’s daughters Laura and Jenn, the eldest, both married. Laura married Paul Lafargue in1868, and Jenny married Charles Longuet in 1872.
But things turned out tragically. Jenny gave birth to 6 children in 9 years, but then died of cancer in 1883 at the age of 38. Her two sisters eventually committed suicide. Eleanor, after protracted problems with Edward Aveling, took her own life in 1898; Laura who had married Paul Lafargue, took her own life in 1911.
Despite these tragedies Marx continued to study, but then his wife, also named Jenny, died in1881. In the next two years after this death Marx spent his time travelling in the hope of regaining his health. But in March1883 Marx himself died at his desk, two months after his eldest daughter Jenny took her own life.
There follows here a list of Marxian Concepts. Note that some of the contents are rather long, and other concepts may be added later.
Alienation
This entry draws on Bottomore and Rubel (1963)
In their introductory work the authors point out that initially Marx was introduced to the treatment of Alienation by the philosopher Hegel. But Hegel saw Alienation as
a condition where a persons own powers ‘appeared as self-subsistent forces or entities’ (20) controlling the persons actions.
Another writer Feuerbach used the notion of alienation with regard to Christianity. He showed that the ‘essence of religion was the essence of man himself projected outside himself and reified or personified. The powers and capacities attributed to the gods were in fact man’s own powers and capacities; the divine law was nothing but the law of man’s own nature’ (20).
Marx started from the position that Feuerbach had reached. He saw alienation as a social phenomenon between people.
He then asked in what circumstances do people project their own powers and values on hypothetical superhuman beings?
He then saw the State ‘as an arbitrary external power dominating society as another form of human alienation’ (20).
To that he added wealth in the form of capital as another form of alienation as ‘the domination of living men by dead matter’ (21).
Further on the authors look at Marx’s ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ (EPM), where Marx considers the effects of capitalism on alienation.
Marx starts by pointing out that the economists who make up ‘political economy’ just accept private property, but do not understand how to explain it. Moreover these economists are unable to explain the distinction of labour from capital (175).
He goes on to say that the concept of ‘alienated labour’ allows one to see that although private property appears to be the basis and cause of alienated labour it is the other way round; that is private property is in fact the result of alienated labour. (176)
He then examines alienated labour itself. First, the work of employed labour is external to the worker, it is not part of his nature and he does not fulfil himself in this work. He thus only feels at home during his leisure, and not during his employment. Thus his work is not voluntary, but it is imposed and can be called forced labour. (177) Again the product of the worker does not belong to him, it belongs to his employer.
The more the worker produces in is work, ‘the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in the face of himself, the less he belongs to himself. As in religion, the more of himself man attributes to God, the less he has left in himself’ (178).
‘The worker puts his life into the object, and his life then belongs no longer to him but to the object.’ (178)
‘The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that that his labour becomes an object, takes on its own existence, but that it exists outside of him, idependendtly, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power’ (178).
This section concludes by Marx before he turns to money. The product produced by labour now stands opposed to that labour as an alien being as a power independent of the producer. Products of labour are objects with labour embodied within them, and turned into physical things.
In capitalist production where the performance of work objectifies labour into the product nullifies the worker; objectification becomes a loss and a servitude to the object, ‘and appropriation as alienation’ (179).
This entry is taken from Bottomore and Rubel, ‘Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy’, 1963. Passages in quotes are taken by the authors from Karl Marx ‘Economic and Philosophical manuscripts’ 1844.
Commodity Fetishism
In Capital Marx (163) begins by describing a commodity as an extremely obvious trivial thing. But he adds that its analysis shows that it is a very strange thing. Its strangeness he explains does no arise from the commodity’s use value.
Here we turn to David Harvey who explains Capital for us (38 to 41). To explain its strangeness Harvey begins by quoting Marx,
“The mysterious character of the commodity form consists ……. simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-naturalproprties of these things (164 to 5”).
Harvey then notes that “the problem character of the commodity form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material … relations arising out of this (19).”
Thus, he says, ‘Our sensuous experience of the commodity as use value has nothng to do with its value.’
Marx goes on, ‘commodities are, therefore, ‘sensuous things which at the same time supra-sensible or social.’
To this he adds that a ‘definite social relation between men theselves ….assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things’.
And it is this condition, says Harvey, that defines ‘the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities’.
This fetishism is, says Marx, ‘is inseparable from the production of production of commodities.’ (165).
This is because producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour in market situations. And they cannot know the what the value of their commodity is until they exchange it.
Marx comments on this that, ‘To the producers therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are – i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material …. relations between persons and and social relations between things.’ (underline added) (165 to 166).
Harvey notes that that this disguise Marx calls ‘fetishism’ is quite different from other common usages. He also notes that Marx is concerned in this area to ‘show how the market system and money forms disguise real social relations through the exchange of things’ (41).
Note that most of the above has been taken from David Harvey 2010.
To conclude this entry Ben Fine points out that Commodity Fetishism is never taken up again by Marx explicitly or at length in Capital or elsewhere. However fetishism is taken up again in other parts of Capital to show the way that the economic forms of capitalism conceal underlying social relations; as an example he explains that Capital is seen as the source of profit when in fact Surplus Value is the real source of profit.
David Harvey, 2010, ‘A companion to Marx’s Capital’
Ben Fine, (102), in “A Dictionary of Marxist Thought” 2nd edition, edited by Tom Bottomore.
Also Quotations from Marx, Capital 1, Chapter 1
Concrete and Abstract Labour
Marx writes that labouring activity “is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself.”
But labour which produces the commodity has a dual character.
Concrete Labour
First, any act of labouring is “productive activity of a definite kind, carried on with a definite aim” (Marx); so considered, it is “useful labour” or “concrete labour”, and its product is a use value.
Abstract Labour
Secondly, any act of labouring can be considered apart from its specific characteristics, as purely the expenditure of human labour, ‘human labour pure and simple, the expenditure of human labour in general’. The expenditure of human labour considered in this aspect creates value, and is called ‘abstract labour’.
Concrete labour and abstract labour are not different activities, they are the same activity considered in its different aspects.
This is taken from Simon Mohun’s contribution to “A Dictionary of Marxist Thought” 2nd Edition, edited by Tom Bottomore. Writing within quotations is taken from Marx, Capital 1, Chapter 1.
Dictatorship of the proletariat
In a letter to J. Wedemeyer (5 March 1852) Marx denied that he had discovered classes or class struggles, but insisted that ‘what I did that was new was to prove
(1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular 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.
But Marx didn’t define exactly what he meant by the term, until much later.
In ‘Class Struggles’ he speaks of the class dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary intermediate point on the path towards the abolition of class differences in general.
Also in the Critique of the Cotha Programme he spoke of a period of revolutionary transformation from capitalism to communism, accompanied by a transition in the political sphere. In this period the state can only take the form of a revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
However Marx wrote in 1871 a description of the Paris Commune in a paper headed ‘The Civil War in France.
Engels wrote in an introduction to a German reprint of the paper said, in 1891,
“Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”
Marx himself said of the Commune, that unlike all previous revolutions, that the state apparatus was being dismantled and power was given to the people. The municiple council of the Commune was elected by universal suffrage, and it’s members were predominately working people and acknowledged representatives of the working class.
The Commune was to be a working body and at the same time a legislative collection. Police were dismissed, the standing army was suppressed and replaced by the armed people. Public servants such as magistrates and judges were to be elected and could be replaced at any time; and all such work was to be done at workmen’s wages.
Finally,
“Marx saw the Commune as an attempt to give power to the working class and to bring into
being a regime as close to direct democracy as was possible“
This entry was taken from Ralph Miliband (151) in ‘A Dictionary of Marxist Thought’, 2nd edition, by Tom Bottomore (1983).
Immiseration
Marx deals with this issue in Chapter 25 of Capital 1, ‘The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation’, which will be considered a little later.
Evans (1975) writes (101 to 102) that,
“it has … been much debated whether we should understand the immiseration of the working class depicted in Capital in an absolute or a relative sense’.
The latter sense, relativity, is consistent with cases where total capital rises by more than the rise in workers wages.
Alternatively the absolute sense refers to situations of actual physical deprivation. The absolutists also argue that Marx implies that relative immiseration situations are merely brief occurrences in a worsening circumstances.
This view is supported by the fact that the demand for labour falls as total capital rises, instead of the two remaining in proportion with one another. Certainly says Evans, the output of consumer goods rises more than the demand for them, as most of the population cannot afford them.
Marx argued that the size of the ‘industrial reserve army’ grows as capitalism advances, and those poor people can only exist in a state of pauperism.
Marx also wrote that,
‘Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, at the same time, accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, that is on th side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.’
Such passages do imply absolute immiseration, and absolutists point to such passages in support of their beliefs. They also argue that the working class have enjoyed rising living standards, and claim that Marx was wrong in this basic theory.
Despite the above Evans argues (101) that Marx’s theory only commits him to relative immiseration. He said that lack of space led him to concentrate on the worst part of the industrial workers and the agricultural workers who together made up the majority of the working class; but this led to a gloomier picture of his theory than was called for.
Still, Evans finds many of Marx’s passages in Capital1 where he emphasises the relative worsening position of workers (102).
Evans then turns to unpublished manuscripts of Marx where he describes capitalist developments that are not incompatible with Capital 1, but are hard to reconcile with it.
Here Marx refers to social groups who live on the surplus created by productive workers. He talks of unproductive workers whose services ar exchanged for revenue; these might be servants or commercial workers. Thus Marx talks of the rise of the rise of productivity in production that allows for a larger and larger section of workers in a servant class, as well as the rise of commercial workers who produce no surplus value but who are among the better paid wage earners. In these pages Says Evans a differentiation between groups is implied rather than one homogeneous working class.
Evans then says certain things can be said with confidence (103). Thus Marx’s later views see a relative immiseration of workers, where the class is differentiated rather than one whole class of workers receiving similar wages. This results from a decline in the numbers of industrial workers in relation to the whole class. This being a more complex picture than the one described in the much earlier Communist Manifesto.
Harvey (2010) too examines Marx’s view of immiseration in his book covering Marx’s Capital Volume1.
He reproduces Marx’s final thesis describing the increasing immiseration of the working class as, the consequence of capitalist accumulation.
Here we see part of this thesis as taken from Wheen (1999) and where Harvey says that ‘this is the first era in US history in which workers have not benefited from significant increases in productivity (281) and all benefits have gone to the capitalist class producing immense concentrations of wealth. So these developments in production become means of domination and exploitation of workers such that they,
“ distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labourprocess to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working time, and drag his wife and child beneah the wheels of the juggernaut of capital ….. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is. therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degredation at the opposite pole. (Wheen (301), from Marx (Capital 1 – 799).
While this is Marx’s concluding thesis on immiseratiom, it can of course be seen as mistaken. Many workers around the world are now better off; they have cars and other commodities.
But Harvey (283) reminds us that workers in Indonesia, in Bangladesh, in Vietnam and Guatemala are treated to appalling conditions of labour. He suggests that the contrasting treatments of workers in rich countries and workers in poor countries are the result of Neoliberal practices started by Reagan in America and Thatcher in Britain; and alongside the terrible treatment of poor country workers at one pole there are billionaires erupting all over the place, at the other pole.
But these are modern situations. Ernest Mandel, in his introduction to Marx’s Capital 1 asks how,
“…has it been possible for so many writers, for so long, to have attributed to Marx a theory of absolute impoverishment of the workers under capitalism” (70).
Mandel accepts that Marx held such a theory in his youth, but that in his older self in 1857 and 8 he brought his understanding of capitalist production to its mature conclusion.
Finally Mandel ((71) argues that two famous passages in Capital 1 have been consistently misinterpreted. In both passages Marx speaks of ‘increasing misery’, pauperism and about accumulation of misery.
He adds that the context clearly indicates that in this case Marx is referring to the poverty and misery of the ‘surplus population’; that is the ‘Lazarus layer of the working class’, the unemployed or the semi employed. And Mandel refers us to pages 797, 798 and 799 of Capital 1.
He then points to (71),
“Revealing studies on poverty in rich countries like the United States and Great Britain have strikingly confirmed that the misery of these old age pensioners, unemployed, sick, homeless, degraded or irregularly working lower layers pf the proletariat is indeed a permanent feature of capitalism, including the capitalism of the ‘welfare state’ “
To summarise these three pages of Marx -797, 798, 799 – it is clear that the immserated population are those described on page 797, and referred to above; the ‘Lazarus layer of the working class – the ‘surplus population’ suffering poverty and misery – the unemployed or the semi employed.
On page 798 Marx describes what he calls the ‘industrial reserve army’,
“The greater the social wealth …. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth …. The more extensive, finally, the pauperised section of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.
We can now understand the foolishness of the economic wisdom which preaches to the workers that they should adapt their numbers to the valorisation requirements of capital. The mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation itself constantly effects this adjustment.
The first word of this adaptation is the creation of of a relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army. Its last word is is the misery … of the constantly expanding strata of the active army of labour and the dead weight of pauperism. Marx 798”
Clearly some of this surplus population may indeed be included in the definition of the immiserated.
On page 799 Marx describes the lot of the employed mass of the working class,
“ … within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker … they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine … they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus value are a the same time methods of accumulation. … It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.
Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degradation at the opposite pole, that is on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.
These three pages define three populations. The first are the unemployed and semi unemployed, and old people , widows and disabled. This population cannot work, or only work sometimes; and they become the immiserated.
The second population are the ‘industrial reserve army’ – or the long term unemployed – the numbers of which grow as wealth grows. These people are pauperised and lead miserable lives. Some of these could be Immiserated.
Finally are the long term employed people, who are treated badly by their employers, and become appendages of the production machinery. While their lives are poorly rewarded and their work nor particularly valued they are not pauperisd annd do not fotm part of the immiserated population.
Francis Wheen is the last writer we consider. Wheen is strongly of the opinion that the mature Marx did not mean that the whole working class would become immiserated.
He quotes Marx as writing,
“Pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It forms part of the incidental expenses of capitalist production: but capital usually knows how to transfer these from its own shoulders to those of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie” (300)
Wheen then points out that Marx is not referring to the pauperism of the whole working class but to the ‘lowest sediment of society – the unemployed, the ragged, the sick, the old, the widows and orphans.
He adds (301) that a careful reading of Marx will show that only the unemployed and semi unemployed, and old people , widows and disabled are likely to become immiserated – not the whole working class.
He goes on to say that a less careful reader – or an ‘economics lecturer’ – could maintain that Marx predicted ‘absolute financial impoverishment’ for all workers.
He gives as an example (300) that Paul Samuelson – a highly thought of American economist and Nobel Prize winner – has declared that all of Marx’s work can be ignored because the impoverishment of the entire working class never took place. Moreover Samuelson’s books have been the staple texts for American and British economics students for generations.
But Samuelson’s view is a myth, says Wheen (300), and is based on a misreading of Marx’s Chapter 25 of Capital1.
Marx’s Dialectics
This entry leans heavily on the view of David Harvey (2010)
Harvey (13) writes that to appreciate Marx’s dialectical method in Capital ii is essential to understand Marx in his own terms.
While Marx’s ideas of dialectics derive from Hegel, Marx’s dialectic is in its foundation exactly opposite to Hegel.
In doing so Marx had to ‘reconfigure dialectics so that it could grasp’ (11) the motion and fluidity of capitalism together with its dynamics and tendency to change. Harvey notes that Marx is often seen as a fixed structuralist thinker; but reading capital shows that Marx always talks of movement and motion. So reading Marx on his own terms entails ‘grappling’ with what he means by dialectics (12).
Later Harvey calls Marx’s dialectics an ‘expansionary logic’ (62). Dialectics are often seen as ‘thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; but for Marx there is no synthesis; there is only the great expansion of the contradiction, and the task says Marx is to analyze the contradictions that money-forms internalyze. (62 to 63).
While Marx’s dialectic is often seen as a closed method of analysis, this I totally mistaken. Marx’s dialectic is constantly expanding, and the argument of Capital is a constantlyy ‘reshaping, rephrasing and expansion of the field of contradictions.’ (63).
Harvey finds in Marx’s work ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, an intriguing chapter. Here Hegel launches into ‘a discussion of the internal contradictions of capitalism.’
He ‘notes the dependence and distress of the class tied’ to certain types of work that lead to general impoverishment and the creation of a ‘rabble’ of paupers. At the same time he finds ‘at the other end of the social scale the concentration of disproportionate wealth in a few hands’.
Hegel observes ‘that despite an excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough ….. to check excessive poverty and the creation of a penurious rabble’ and
” the inner dialectic of civil society thus drives ….. a specific civil society to push beyond its own limits and seek markets, and so its necessary means of subsistence, in other lands which are either deficient in the goods it has over-produced, or are generally backward in industry” (303)
Harvey notes that this paragraph of Hegel is vey similar to Marx’s Chapter 25 of Capital 1.
Thus a mature society is driven to colonising activity by which it supplies to a part of its population a return to family life in a new land, and at the same time supplies itself with a new demand for its own industry.
So what might be called an ‘inner dialectic’ produces more and more social inequality. As Hegel says in an addendum to one of his paragraphs,
“against nature man can claim no right, but once society is established, poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one class by another” (303)
This inner dialectic based on class struggle leads civil societies to seek a solution in an ‘outer dialectic’ of colonial and imperialist activity. It is not clear whether Hegel thought this move would resolve the inner problems, but Marx was quite adamant that it could not.
In capital Marx writes that colonial practices merely recreate the social relations of capitalism on a wider scale. Therefore there can be no colonial solution to the internal class contradictions of capitalism, and no ultimate spatial fix to the internal contradictions.
Harvey adds (304) that we are reminded over and over that ‘globalisation’ only offers a temporary fix to internal problems by projecting them onto a larger and wider geographical area.
The Materialist Conception of History
“I was led by my studies to the conclusion that legal relations as well as forms of state could neither be understood by themselves, nor explained by the so-called general progress of the human mind, but that they are rooted in the,material conditions of life, which are summed up by Hegel after the fashion of the English and French writers of the eighteenth century under the name civil society, and that the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy. The study of the latter which I had begun in Paris, I continued in Brussels where I had emigrated on account of an expulsion order issued by M. Guizot. The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, continued to serve as the guiding thread in my studies, may be formulated briefly as follows.
In the social production which men (people) carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, these relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society – on which legal and political superstructures arise and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond.
The mode of production of material life determines the general character the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men (people) that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work before. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.
Then occurs a period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must rather be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social forces of production and the relations of production.
No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been 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. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, on closer examination, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonisms, but of conflict arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals in society; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. With this social formation, therefore, the prehistory of human society comes to an end.”
(Bottomore and Rubel, 1963). This extract taken from Marx’s ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
Productive forces
Marxist theory is identified with the fundamentally determining role played by production.
Also, all societies are characterized by a definite configuration of socially and historically constituted forces and relations of production which constitute the basis upon which other economic and social relations rest.
“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.” (Marx, preface to ‘Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.)
Relations of Production
Relations of production are constituted by the economic ownership of productive forces under capitalism; the most fundamental of these relations is the capitalist’s ownership of the means of production, while the proletariat owns only its labour power.
Quoted from L. Harris, (206) in ‘A Dictionary of Marxist Thought’, 2nd edition, by Tom Bottomore (1983).
This writers addition; presumably The Relations of Production would include Trades Union action by the workers, and action to lengthen the working day by the capitalist employers.
Profit, Wealth and Value 