Karl Marx Works Essay, Research Paper

How can a book written in one historical epoch have a meaning for another? If the author has tried to answer the questions posed by the way of life of the people around him, what can these answers mean for those living under changed conditions and facing quite different questions? [1] In the case of Karl Marx, we have yet another barrier to penetrate. At the end of the twentieth century, when we pick up a text like the Manifesto, we already have in our minds what ?everybody knows? about it. Before we even glance at its pages, distorting spectacles have been placed on our noses by the tradition known as ?Marxism?. Even today, Stalinism’s obscene misuse of the word ?communism? colours everything we read.

The upholders of ?Marxism? thought of it as a science, and at the same time declared it to be a complete world outlook. These claims, which clearly contradict each other, make it impossible to understand the task which Marx set himself, a task that, by its very nature, no body of ?theory? could complete. For his aim was no less than to make possible ?the development of communist consciousness on a mass scale?. It was not enough just to prepare the overthrow of the ruling class. This particular revolution required the alteration of humans on a mass scale … because the class overthrowing it [the ruling class] can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages. [2]

So the first step was not a ?political theory?, not a ?model of society?, not simply a call for revolution, but a conception of humanity. What Marx aimed at was, simultaneously, a science that comprehended human development, an understanding of how that development had become imprisoned within social forms that denied humanity, and a knowledge of the way that humanity was to liberate itself from that prison. Indeed, only through the struggle for liberation could we understand what humanity was. In essence, it was that ?ensemble of social relations? [3], which made possible free, collective, self-creation. He showed how modern social relations fragmented society and formed a barrier to our potential for freedom, while, at the same time, providing the conditions for freedom to be actualised.

If we want to understand the Manifesto, we must read it as an early attempt to tackle all of these issues, set within the framework of a political statement. More clearly than any other of its author’s works, it contradicts the ?Marxist? representation of Marx as a ?philosopher?, an ?economist?, a ?sociologist?, a ?theorist of history?, or any other kind of ?social scientist?. To grasp what he was doing, we have to break through all the efforts of academic thinking to separate knowledge from the collective self-transformation of humanity. Indeed, one of the tasks of the Manifesto is to lay bare the source of all such thinking, finding it precisely within humanity’s inhuman condition. Marx’s science situates itself inside the struggle to transform our entire way of living.

Of course, in the past fifteen decades, the forms of capital and the conditions of the working class have changed profoundly in innumerable ways. But we still live in the same historical epoch as Marx, and, if we listen to what he has to say, we shall discover him to be our contemporary. So let us attempt to remove those ?Marxist? spectacles, which prevented us from seeing just how original was Marx’s conception. Then, perhaps, we shall be able to confront this product of nineteenth-century Western Europe with the agonising problems of today’s ?globalised? society. The essence of the Manifesto is not merely relevant for our time; it is vital for us, if humanity is to grope its way forward.

The Communist League

The Communist Manifesto was written in a Europe that was on the eve of the revolutionary upheavals of 1848, and that also still lived in the shadow of the revolutionary struggles of 1789-1815. It is a response to both of these, the storm to come and the one that had passed. Between 1844 and 1847, in Berlin, Brussels, Paris and Manchester, Marx and Engels had encountered the ideas of the various groups of socialists and communists, and had also studied the organisations of the rapidly-growing working class. Hitherto, these two, socialism and the working class, had been quite separate from, or even hostile to each other. The achievement of the Manifesto was to establish the foundations on which they could be united.

From this work came a new conception of communism, situated within the historical context of their time. As the Manifesto puts it, communism was not ?based on ideas or principles that have been invented or discovered by this or that would-be universal reformer.? [4] It had to be seen as the culmination and meaning of working-class struggle, and this struggle itself provided the key to understanding the existing economic relations. The ?Marxists? thought they found in the Manifesto a ?theoretical? analysis of ?capitalism? and a ?theory of history?. Actually, Marx was scornful of all pretence of having a ?supra-historical theory of history? [5], never used the word ?capitalism? and spent his life writing a critique of the very idea of political economy.

Every line of the Manifesto is permeated with his conception of communism. This was not a plan for an ideal future social set-up, worked out by some reforming genius, to be imposed on the world by his followers. Instead, it was to be the outcome of the development of the working-class movement itself, and therefore arose within the existing social order. Marx had turned towards the ideas of communism in 1844, Engels preceding him by two years. For three years, they discussed ? and argued ? with the many socialist and communist sects in Germany, France, Belgium and England, but joined none of them. Then, in 1847 they decided to join together with some former members of one of these secret groups, the League of the Just.

The League, which was largely German, and which had mainly consisted of workers and artisans [6], had more or less disappeared by that time. Its old members had outgrown the ideas of their leading figure, the heroic founder of the German workers’ movement, Wilhelm Weitling, and come closer to Marx’s view of communism. Marx and Engels, on the basis of their new-found ideas, resolved to bring these people together in a new kind of organisation. On one thing they were quite determined: this was not going to be a secret society, like the conspiratorial sects that abounded throughout Europe. It would be an open organisation, with a clearly expounded programme and outlook. The Communist League was formed at a conference in London, in the summer of 1847. A newspaper, the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, issued by the London branch in September of that year, carried the slogan ?Proletarians of all Lands, Unite!?. In November, a second conference assembled. After ten days of discussion, Marx was instructed to prepare a ?Manifesto of the Communist Party?, based upon Engels’ draft ?catechism?, the Principles of Communism. Marx’s work was not finished until early in February, 1848. (As usual, he made slow progress in carrying out their instructions, and the delay brought forth an angry letter from the Committee.) Before printing was complete, the insurrection had broken out in Paris.

What role did the Communist League play in the revolutionary events of 1848-9? As an organisation, almost none. Its individual members, of course, were to the fore in many parts of Europe. Marx and Engels, in particular were leading figures in the Rhineland, where they produced the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. But, as a body, the League itself did not function during those stormy years. In 1850, after the defeat of the movement, exiles in London made an attempt to re-form it, but soon a fierce dispute broke out among them. Willich, Schapper and others dreamed that the revolutionary struggle would soon break out again. Marx and Engels and their supporters were convinced that the revolutionary wave had passed, and that a long period of development of capital would ensue. In 1851, leading members of the League in the Rhineland were arrested and tried in Cologne. After that, the organisation was allowed to disappear. Marx deliberately cut himself off from the exile groups, and did not resume active political involvement for the next twelve years.

The Manifesto and the Class Struggle.

The first thing to note about this document is that it begins and ends with declarations of openness.

It is high time that Communists should openly … publish their aims…

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.

Marx was always totally opposed to the idea that social change could be brought about by some secret group, working behind the back of society. This tendency, identified with the heroic but ineffectual conspiracies of Auguste Blanqui and his friends, was also the target of Marx’s much-misunderstood phrase ?dictatorship of the proletariat?, first used by him four years later. In ?Marxism?, the central meaning of this formula was badly distorted. Quite contrary to any modern connotation of tyranny, Marx wanted to stress that the entire working class must govern, as opposed to any secret group, however benevolent its intentions.

The history of all hitherto existing society has been the history of class struggles.

So runs the famous opening of the first section, ?Bourgeois and Proletarians?, but what does this mean? (Engels’ 1888 footnote, excluding pre-history from this statement, does not really help. [7]) As is well known, the idea of class struggle as a way of explaining history was not invented by Marx, but had been employed by French bourgeois historians in the 1820s. Marx gives it a totally different content. For him, class struggles are an aspect of alienated society, and communism implies their disappearance.

It is quite wrong to read this section as if it presented history as a logical argument, with a deduction of the communist revolution as a conclusion. Ten years later, Marx depicted human history in terms of three great stages:

Relationships of personal dependence (which originally arise quite spontaneously) are the first forms of society … Personal independence based upon dependence mediated by things is the second great form, and only in it is a system of general social exchange of matter, a system of universal relations, universal requirements and universal capacities formed. Free individuality, based on the universal development of the individuals and the subordination of their communal, social productivity, which is the social possession, is the third stage.[8]

Of course, in 1848, Marx was not able to put the matter so clearly, but already the essence of his point of view is precisely that expressed by these lines. The class struggle was for him a feature of the second of these ?stages? only, and bourgeois society marked the end of this entire period. This was the phase of ?alienated life?, where individuals had no control over their own lives. Only in this stage could you speak about ?historical laws?, since individuals were not yet the governors of their social relations. The Manifesto’s paeon of praise for the achievements of the bourgeoisie refers to their (of course, involuntary) work, which prepares for the great advance of humanity to its ?third stage?, communism. This will see human beings living as ?social individuals?, ?universally developed individuals, whose social relationships are their own communal relations, and therefore subjected to their own communal control.? [9] Thus Marx’s entire picture of the movement of history is bound up with his conception of a ?truly human? society, and the obstacles to it within our existing way of life.

Marx does not present us with a static picture of bourgeois social relations, as a sociologist might try to do. Instead, he gives a succinct outline of the birth, development and death of an oppressive and exploitative social order. He shows how ?the bourgeoisie … has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than ‘callous cash payment’.? [10] The class struggle, which has raged over the centuries, has been simplified by the modern bourgeoisie.

Society is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. [11]

This opening section of the Manifesto is concerned with the joint historical development of these classes, including the struggle between them, and the stages of this process are related to the development of modern industry. Thus the huge advances of human productive powers since the eighteenth century have taken the form of the growth of ?new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.? [12] The outcome is that ?man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind?. Just as the development of these ?means of production and exchange? outgrew the feudal relations within which they had developed, now, the powers of modern industry have collided with the bourgeois relations that have ?conjured them up?. [13]

Now, Marx describes the growth of the proletariat, the class of labourers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work on as long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity like every other article of commerce. … Owing to the extensive use of machinery, the work of the proletarian has lost all individual character, and consequently all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine. [14]

The account of wage-labour given here is far from the developed analysis Marx was able to make in Grundrisse, ten years later, and, after still another decade’s work, in Capital, but it still gets to the heart of the matter.

What is unprecedented about this particular form of class struggle, Marx explains, is that it prepares the objective ground for the transcendence of classes as such, and of all forms of oppression.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other mode of appropriation. … The proletariat cannot raise itself up without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air. [15]

Throughout the Manifesto, Marx stresses the ?cosmopolitan character? of bourgeois society, reflecting the development of a world market. ?The need of a constantly-expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.? It is because of this that the struggle of the proletariat, while national ?in form?, is international ?in substance?. [16]

Marx’s account of bourgeois society as the objective preparation for the proletarian revolution is bound up with the emergence of the consciousness necessary for the transformation of the whole of world society. The ?Marxists? attributed to Marx a philosophical outlook called ?historical materialism?, a way of ?explaining? the world. This was sometimes presented as a mechanical model of history, in which ?material conditions? caused changes in consciousness. But this directly contradicts what Marx himself was doing. After all, was he not engaged in the struggle for the development of consciousness, and wasn’t communism precisely the way for humanity to take conscious charge of history?

Bourgeois society, the last possible form of the class struggle, had also to bring forth the subjective elements needed for its conscious transcendence. Central to this is ?the organisation of the proletarians into a class and consequently into a political party?, and that means its self-organisation. But that is not all. In a vitally important paragraph, Marx describes how the break-up of the old order, and of the ruling class itself, has another consequence:

A small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class, the class which holds the future in its hands … in particular a portion of the bourgeois ideologists who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending the historical movement as a whole. [17]

This is a remarkable passage. These ?bourgeois ideologists? undoubtedly include Marx and Engels themselves. In 1847, how many others could there have been? Never before had an author been able to put himself into the picture in this way, explaining the origin of his own work in terms of the objective conditions it was investigating. Thus the objective, material development of modern industry is bound up with the development of the understanding of the need to emancipate these forces from the perverting power of capital.

When Marx speaks of the proletariat, he does not mean the members of a sociological category, the collection of those who can be labelled as ?wage-earners?. He is talking about a real movement, an objectively founded aspect of modern social life. People who sell their ability to labour find themselves involved in an antagonistic relation to the owners of capital, whether they like it or not, and whatever they may think.

The proletarian movement is the independent [18] movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority. [19]

Obviously, many of the details of the picture of the world presented by Marx in 1848 are hardly to be found in the world of today. As Marx himself realised a short time later, his time-scale was extremely foreshortened. But, a hundred and fifty years on, it is amazing how many of its essential features are still at the heart of our problems.

The Role of the Communists

The second section, ?Proletarians and Communists?, largely consists of an imaginary dialogue with a bourgeois objector to the idea of communism. It begins by situating the Communists in Marx’s picture of the development of the proletariat. Many of its ideas are drawn from the doctrines of previous socialist and communist groups, and also from Engels’ draft. But, from his standpoint, set out in the previous section, he transforms them into something quite new.

The members of the League gave their declaration the title ?Manifesto of the Communist Party?. They could not anticipate how much misunderstanding this word ?party? would cause for future decades, when it had so changed its meaning. For Marx and his comrades, it certainly did not mean the type of bureaucratic structure with which we associate it today, but a section of society, a social-political trend. Again stressing the open, anti-conspiratorial nature of communism, Marx declares

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement. … The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of power by the proletariat. … The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. [20]

Objects have been privately owned for millennia, so that individuals have been able to say of something, or even somebody, ?this is mine?. But the latest form of private property is different. Capital is ?a collective product?, set in motion only by ?the united action of all members of society … not a personal, but a social power.? [21] Abolishing this power, capital, is the only way to ensure that ?accumulated labour becomes a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.?

Marx goes on to summarise the communist critique of the false bourgeois conceptions of freedom, individuality, culture, the family and education, attacking in particular the oppression of women within bourgeois society. After this, he outlines the nature of the proletarian revolution, ?to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class, to win the battle of democracy?, and identifies the resulting state with ?the proletariat organised as the ruling class?. [22]

The 10-point political programme for the first steps of the revolution with which this section ends, is interesting mainly for its surprisingly mild character. Clearly, Marx does not consider revolution as a sudden overnight transformation, resulting from some kind of coup d’?tat, however violent it might be. He refers to the situation following a prolonged historical transition, when in the course of development class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation. [23]

Then, he anticipates, ?the public power will lose its political character?. The proletariat will have ?abolished its own supremacy as a class?.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. [24]

This sentence summarises a world of ideas which Marx has extracted and negated from the history of philosophy and political economy. It embodies his entire conception of what it means to live humanly. Potentially, humans can be free, but only when the freely created life of the whole of society is completely and visibly bound up with the growth of each individual. Private property stands as a barrier to such freedom.

The third section of the Manifesto deals scornfully with most of the previous socialist doctrines, all of which have by now long disappeared from history. However, its final pages refer to ?Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism? with great respect. Marx attributes the limitations of the work of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and others to the ? unconscious ? reflection of the ?early undeveloped period … of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie?. While being ?full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class?, they could see the proletariat only as ?a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement?, as ?the most suffering class?. Because, in their time, ?the economic situation … does not offer them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat?, they could do no more than ?search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions?. That is why they could be no more than ?Utopians?, who merely painted ?fantastic pictures of future society?. [25] In contrast to them, Marx insists that communism is a ?real movement?, not a dream.

The Subject of History

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