In Covid’s Wake (3 of 6) The US as a laboratory

Posted on April 22, 2026 by irishmarxism

The authors of In Covid’s Wake note that the United States formed a laboratory in which an experiment on the different approached to the Covid-19 pandemic was played out. In Democrat controlled states the speed at which restrictions were imposed, the length of stay-at-home orders, length of school closures, and the stringency of Covid restrictions were all faster or greater. The willingness of residents to be vaccinated was also greater.

The resulting pattern was noticed in late 2023:

Until vaccines became available, there was little difference in COVID death rates between blue states and red states.
After vaccines became available, there were clear differences, with red states having higher death rates.

The book therefore states that ‘variation in vaccination rates can account for fully 47 percent of state-by-state mortality.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 140, 142) It also records that the lack of difference evident by the summer of 2020 ‘went broadly unreported, despite its inconsistency with the epidemiological models that had seen so much media coverage earlier in the year.’ One of these models reported “substantial reductions in peak attack rates “due to school closures”. (In Covid’s Wake, p 146, 148)

In the UK, a review of the literature to March 2023 reported that ‘there are still many uncertainties and unknowns’ while the Scottish official inquiry concluded that “there was insufficient evidence in 2020 –or alternatively no evidence.” So even after the pandemic the authorities were claiming not to have learned much, if anything, about their basic approach. (In Covid’s Wake, p 154)

Some countries with light restrictions fared well while others didn’t; ‘Japan fared better than Australia and only slightly worse than New Zealand in terms of Covid mortality, despite never imposing a lockdown or widespread business closures nor making much use of Covid testing and contact tracing . . . The underlying determinants of population health–poverty, education, comorbidity profile–shaped Covid pandemic outcomes far more reliably than non-pharmaceutical interventions.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 157)

In the US the two Democrat-leaning authors lament that ‘rather than learning from the policy experimentation that was taking place, decision-making about pandemic policy was rigidly ideological and moralized’. Democrats didn’t learn about the absence of support for lockdowns and Republicans, or at least some of them, didn’t learn about the efficacy of vaccination. For the two authors this failure of ‘partisan politics is the main lesson of the pandemic.

As for the left that advocated even more severe restrictions, there is no evidence that they ever, at any point, looked in the rear view mirror; Covid may as well never have happened. The morally right are right–by definition. The idea of having any sort of cost-benefit analysis was dismissed as involving a straight comparison between saving lives and saving money; ‘health versus wealth’ as the book puts it. The world’s capitalist governments were charged with being more interested in the economy than public health and people’s lives. Further shutting down the economy was being opposed, it was claimed, in order to protect capitalist profits, in the process risking workers’ lives.

At the time this blog noted that capitalist economies produce commodities with a use value as well as an exchange value, without which they cannot assure their sale and realisation of profit. It was never clear just exactly what production was not ‘essential’ and could be shut down, and how massive reductions in production could be accomplished in order to achieve ‘zero-Covid’ while also creating correspondingly massive income flows for those now unproductively unemployed.

Even the view that the governments’ response was focused on maintain capitalist profits hardly squares with the single focus on public health by those state officials tasked with leading the response who consciously excluded economic and social experts. The mathematical models that were so influential only looked at the effects of policy on Covid transmission, hospitalisation and deaths. None looked at the health, social and economic consequences of lockdown to see were its costs exceeding its benefits. A point not strongly made in the book is that with models predicting catastrophe this might seem understandable, but as we have noted, when the models failed to correspond with reality the experts doubled down on lockdown.

The media played its role by stating that the pandemic closed schools and travel etc., not that it was the lockdown, and that this was a choice. Rather like wages causing unemployment or inflation, or the war in Ukraine causing high energy prices, the conditions and interventions that actually caused them were rendered invisible.

What also became invisible was that it was overwhelmingly white collar workers who were working from home. Blue collar workers kept working and were a stranding rebuke to those who claimed that lockdown was needed to prevent ‘mass death.’ A left more in touch with this section of the working class might have appreciated this. The authors of the book note that, while stoking fear of the pandemic, the lowest paid and vulnerable workers were expected to show up. So did all those calling for ‘zero-covid’, unless they didn’t actually mean zero.

The policy of lockdown was popular among trade unions and among the majority of their members. The book records the Chicago Teachers’ Union tweeting that ‘the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny’, while the head of United Teachers of Los Angeles described school reopening as a recipe for propagating structural racism.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p132)

In fact, schools were not a vector for transmission while those workers tasked with continuing to work as normal probably included a large proportion of women and black workers. Not for the first time politics based on identity got it wrong, ironically weakening the cause of women and black workers in the process.

Back to part 2

Should we be inspired by the fuel protests?

Posted on April 12, 2026 by irishmarxism

The fuel protests in Ireland have involved the blocking of main roads, including O’Connell street in Dublin city centre, the M50 motorway around the city, sea ports and an oil refinery, leading to disruption of supplies and closure of hundreds of petrol stations. Originally taken by surprise, and then taking a softly-softly approach, the state has moved the Garda to clear some protests away while negotiating concessions with representative bodies of some of the protestors, including seeking permission from the EU for cuts to excise duties.

The protests are mainly formed by hauliers, agricultural suppliers and farmers; in general, small businessmen and the self-employed. In class terms, the petty bourgeoisie. The mass of the population, including workers, are also badly hit by the rise in prices and there is general sympathy with the demand for measures by the government to reduce the impact of rising prices; especially given the large budget surpluses the state has garnered in the last number of years through the Irish state being a tax haven for a small number of US multinationals.

A number of far right figures have attached themselves to the protests and the People before Profit TD Paul Murphy was more or less chased away when he went to meet one protest in Dublin. A flavour of some of the self-appointed protest spokesmen who have attempted to sideline the trade associations is James Geoghegan who has revenue judgements of more than €500k against him, plus animal cruelty convictions. Another prominent figure has previously stated he couldn’t care less if Greta Thunberg got raped or beaten, while claiming that instead of ‘free Palestine’ flags, some people will be waving ‘free Dublin’ ones.

The ignorant and abusive taunts by some protesters received by Paul Murphy has not stopped him stating that the protests should be supported. He has called on ‘ordinary people’ to take mass action in effective protests; yet the existing protests are by ‘ordinary people’ in so far as this means anything at all, and they have had some effect. He states that the working class should take inspiration from them and calls on it to take mass action while trade unions should take the lead.

While there is evidence of limited prior organisation, the protests are essentially spontaneous. The principal participation is by forces that the two main bourgeois parties rely on as a base, and they are not forces that the working class should take inspiration from. The prominence of reactionary and far right figures is not accidental while there is no form of democratic control of any sort of progressive movement or organisation.

The social base of the protest is not therefore working class and claims to be representing the ordinary people of Ireland simply exposes the vacuous nature of basing politics on ‘the people’ that we have criticised before, and which Murphy’s party has been guilty of. He is right that the working class should have a mass campaign and the trade unions should take the lead, but they haven’t and they won’t. The left has not built a larger movement or an opposition inside the trade union movement and cannot rely on a working class spontaneous movement to rival that which has just erupted.

This weakness of the left has been reviewed before and the current situation is illustrative of the results. The perspective of a left government championed by People before Profit has now obviously nothing to do with a left movement that would act in situations like this. The putative components of it, such as the Labour Party, Social Democrats and Greens have all opposed the protests while People before Profit supports them. Sinn Fein, as usual, triangulates. Any such future government would therefore simply be an administration put together by horse-trading jobs and policies and would have no social movement that could conceivably drive it forward and represent it, which is presumably what PbP envisages?

The weakness of this perspective, demonstrated by the protests, is shown in two other ways, one significant and one symbolic.

Murphy says the protests should be supported because they have the same aims as People before Profit, which had previously sought to introduce price caps through legislation in the Dáil. First, it’s not clear that the protests do have the same objective and are not directed at caps on the fuels used by the protesters. Secondly, the idea of price caps is a utopian one in any case.

They cannot provide the ‘security’ claimed for them because they can’t promise to cover massive price increases such as have been incurred, which is precisely their purpose; and claims to stop ‘profiteering’ don’t work in a system in which profiteering is its whole purpose. This is, after all, why socialists think an alternative socialist society is required. If profiteering could be eradicated, we wouldn’t need socialism.

The second, symbolic reason, were the reactions of the protesters to Paul Murphy’s presence at the protest. They portrayed him as simply another politician, which in so far as he thinks legislating in the Dáil will do away with profiteering, is actually close to the truth! The far right get away with this because of the grain of truth involved–that the left has built only an electoralist base in a few working class areas based on their own variety of clientelist practices. The jibes about Murphy’s identification with gender identity simply illustrate how easily the right can paint the left as divorced from working class concerns, aside even from the stupidity of the view itself that we have repeatedly demolished.

There is nothing wrong in seeking measures to get amelioration of sudden price increases but that is all they can be and it is misleading to pretend otherwise. Oil and gas prices are set on the capitalist world market and cannot be avoided by any country and certainly not by one like Ireland. It’s why socialists are internationalists, because socialism can only be international for it to make sense and to work. Within capitalism, the working class can defend itself by actually doing it themselves; by fighting for higher wages and by building a movement that seeks to go beyond these struggles towards the only definitive solution.

It is also true that socialists should seek to win over middle layers of the population to the cause of the working class, but this is only possible if the working class itself has been won and has built a movement that can convince others. Before this, it simply means surrendering to all sorts of misleading and reactionary petty bourgeois ideas.

Numerous people have commented that because the crisis has been caused by Trump and the US imperialist attack on Iran, it would have made more sense to protest and blockade the US embassy. Far from the existing protests inspiring such an action, much of the social base of the protests is as likely to support an Irish O’Trump as protest against US imperialism. Once again, we have a lesson that not all those who oppose our enemies, in this case the Irish government, are our friends.

In Covid’s Wake (2 of 6): ‘mass death . . . is a benefit to be sought’

Posted on April 4, 2026 by irishmarxism

The imposition of lockdown that was justified as ‘following the science’ did not quite achieve the consensus that the claim implied and there were a number of voices challenging it at an early stage.

One epidemiologist in the Washington Post stated that ‘of the first 1,023 people to die in Wuhan, China . . . only one was younger than twenty.’ He wrote that “The high death rate from the coronavirus is driven almost exclusively by the oldest cases . . . the virus causes severe disease almost exclusively in older adults.” In March 2020 an op-ed in the New York Times was entitled ‘Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse than the Disease?’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 72). This blog also had enough information to point this out in March 2020.

Unfortunately, ‘war’ had been declared on Covid-19 and the cliché that the first casualty of war is the truth proved only too true. The consensus in the US was supported by Harvard’s Safra Center on Ethics, the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, and the ‘progressive’ Center for American Progress and focused on testing, tracing and quarantining the infected. The policy that had previously been predicted to be unsuccessful was now the establishment view that brooked no dissent. Yet it made little sense when the virus was already widespread, was asymptomatic while infectious and completely asymptomatic in many who had contracted it.

Sweden presented an alternative in which large gatherings were banned; people over seventy were advised to limit contacts with others; it was advised not visit to nursing homes, and recommended but not mandated that those who could work from home should do so. Society-wide lockdown was not advised: “The storm was already here,” judged Sweden’s health authorities and what remained to be done “was to protect the most vulnerable.” No large-scale test-and-trace regimes were attempted. Masks were never mandated. No stay-at-home orders or restrictions on movement were imposed’ and restaurants, gyms and schools for younger children and adolescents remained open. (In Covid’s Wake, p 85).

The head of Sweden’s Public Health Agency, Anders Tegnell, thought that “the world has gone mad” while ‘many thought Sweden had gone mad’ or ‘insane’. The New York Times described Sweden as a “pariah” and some European media described it as like “a banana republic” (In Covid’s Wake, p 86-7).

The Great Barrington Declaration published online in October 2020 was another alternative view to Lockdown that pointed out the costs and proposed a policy of ‘Focused Protection’: “Our goal should therefore be to minimise mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.” Those who had such immunity ‘could play an especially important role in helping the sick and frail.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 96 & 97)

Herd immunity, however, became a term of abuse, as “simply unethical” and a call to “let it rip”. It was ‘dangerous’ and came from ‘fringe’ and ‘maverick scientists.’ (p 74, 97 &106). One doctor, who had earlier in March gathered 800 signatures warning of the costs of lockdown had seemingly changed his mind; “I have no more fucks left to give. Except those peddling pseudoscience, bankrolled by right-wing, libertarian assholes can kiss my queer ass …. This fucking Great Barrington Declaration is like a bad rash that just won’t go away.” (In Covid’s Wake, p 100)

The vitriol involved in such denunciations reflected not so much a long established scientific consensus as a moral consensus that had especially gripped the ‘left’, becoming the left position because the left had adopted it, assisted by most of the support for the Great Barrington Declaration coming from the right, confirming that this was indeed the right-wing position. The effect was to close debate and remove critical thinking–in moralistic arguments there is simply no arguments in favour of the ‘bad’.

Who made the arguments defined what was right and not the arguments themselves so that ad hominem became de rigeur. From liberal Democrats to the ultra-left, moral condemnation could not be strident enough: The Great Barrington Declaration became ‘A manifesto of death’; ‘mass death, is a benefit to be sought’; ‘the White House’s embrace of the document is a statement of intent for mass homicide’; ‘the ruling class’s drive to allow the mass infection of the population can be imposed only by violence’. Those who defended it on the left were from ‘the pseudo-left’ while ‘the herd immunity policy has found support not only within the capitalist oligarchy, but among sections of the upper-middle class.’

The pandemic was an unprecedented suppression of the most basic civil rights employing the weapons of fear and state surveillance, yet the largest part of the left not only endorsed it, its policy was to intensify it. This was the policy of ‘zero-covid’ that could only ‘be imposed by violence’ as lockdowns began to be relaxed in 2020, only to then be reimposed.

The left website above stated that ‘Workers around the world must welcome the categorical and courageous stand taken by public health experts in opposition to the ruling class’s policy of herd immunity’, except the experts were divided and previous advice stood squarely against lockdowns. Not unsurprisingly, the moralistic and catastrophist argument proved more attractive to a left for whom socialism will only come through capitalist crisis and repression, through force of circumstances, and not through the building of a class conscious movement committed to socialism that is the result of years of political education, clarification and struggle.

The authors of the book note that ‘if recovery from infection would not afford immunity, it is not clear by what mechanism vaccines would confer immunity either.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 102). In June 2020 the World Health Organisation website defined herd immunity as “indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 104). In November the reference to acquired immunity was removed. The voice of ‘science’ was to be put in the service of government policy.

Back to part 1

Forward to part 3

In Covid’s Wake (1 of 6): the past is another country

Posted on March 28, 2026 by irishmarxism

The Irish government report on how the state handled the Covid-19 pandemic is due to report at the end of the year, seven years after it reportedly arrived in Ireland. The delay says a lot, as was the original announcement of the review by the government – that the review was to have a “no-blame” approach and would “not be a UK-style” inquiry. It would not have statutory powers and would be an “evaluation” on the grounds that anything greater would drag on for years. This was not an empty threat given the many previous tribunals of inquiry held by the state, but it rather loses conviction when it took so long to establish in the first place.

Scepticism over its role was heightened by it rejecting the stronger powers of the UK inquiry, but since this failed to question the basic approach to the pandemic adopted by the British government these in themselves would not have promised a full reckoning. A spokesperson for a patient advocate group stated that ‘the Evaluation model protects policies and decision makers from any scrutiny at all’. We shall see.

Two liberal (Democratic Party-type) US academics have published a new book that has much wider relevance than the US, including why it is important that we do not just forget about the whole thing. The book, not surprisingly, is controversial as the consensus it critiques has, also not surprisingly, not gone away. The authors have responded to some criticism here.

It is said that the past is another country but since almost all other countries had the same experience this doesn’t displace it safely to the past, not least because its impact is still with us, never mind the possibility of any repetition.

From the point of view of this blog the focus is on what the book implies for an evaluation of the approach taken by much of the left. Those who have read the coverage during the pandemic will know that it was severely critical of the groupthink that overtook the left and was very much a minority, but not idiosyncratic, view. The Left’s groupthink showed it incapable of challenging the politics of the state and mainstream bourgeois opinion across the world, putting forward a policy–‘Zero Covid’–that was actually much worse.

The suddenness and severity of actions taken by states meant that ‘just a few weeks after the lockdowns spread from China to Italy and elsewhere, 3.9 billion people–half the world’s population–were living under some form of quarantine.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 3) What was also sudden was the adoption of the policy of lockdown that justified this approach. Called “following the science”, it was adopted by overturning the science as it had previously been accepted and became the club to silence and stigmatise those who challenged or even questioned it. The Left consensus simply adopted a more extreme version of this predominant approach.

Several non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including “contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening, [and] border closure” were “not recommended in any circumstances” in a World Health Organisation’s (WHO) assessment in November 2019 of NPI use in a respiratory pandemic. Quarantine of individuals–never mind whole populations–was “not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure in most Member States.” Contact tracing was considered some help in “isolated communities” in the “very early stages of a pandemic.” (In Covid’s Wake, p 29) Other assessments also questioned the use of NPIs, including after reviewing the experience of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

This meant that when China introduced lockdown “public health experts in the United States and elsewhere responded with shock and disbelief”. (In Covid’s Wake, p 50). Dire predictions from Imperial College in London and China’s draconian embrace of lockdown were the occasion for a complete change of approach by the WHO so that now there was no alternative to unprecedented restrictions on freedom of movement backed by massive social surveillance.

Previously inconceivable restrictions became moral imperatives supported by governments, health bureaucracies, health academics and the mainstream media; plus the majority of the left for whom the unprecedented was not unprecedented enough and the draconian not sufficiently draconian. That China’s apparent success kept on being implemented until its population started revolting was all in the future. The WHO’s mission to China found that it provided “vital lessons for the global response” and its measures were the only “proven to interrupt or minimize transmission”, while early predictions were made that it would succeed within three months. (In Covid’s Wake, p 56 &58)

The book records how dubious this claim must have been, including the knowledge that pandemics proceed in waves; millions of people had escaped lockdown in Wuhan, and there could be no confidence in the effect lockdown would have against the progress of a novel virus. The WHO made matters worse by stating that “globally, about 3.4% of reported Covid-19 cases have died”, although it could not know how many people had been infected so could not say what percentage of them had died. Without acting to implement stringent NPIs the modellers of Imperial College predicted “approximately 500,000 deaths” in the UK “and 2.2M million in the US”, along with the collapse of heath systems. “Suppression” of the virus was the only “viable strategy”, with China again held up as the exemplar. (In Covid’s Wake, p 63 &64)

If this didn’t scare you, or rather ‘convince’ you, this might be because you might have known of Imperial College modellers’ previous poor record. In 2006 it had predicted “catastrophe”, ‘forecasting 150 million deaths around the world’ as a result of the outbreak of avian flu. Nevertheless, the book’s authors note that Imperial College Covid projections ‘captured the headlines and grabbed the attention of Covid policymakers, including President Donald Trump.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 51)

Given the forces ranged against any possible dissent it is not surprising that the ‘global suspension of basic liberties was undertaken with widespread public support.’ This was despite the book stating that ‘it is important not to ascribe to policymakers’ views more coherence than they possessed with respect to the goals of the policies they pursued. To some extent, policymakers failed to reckon with the choices between flattening the curve, attempting to contain the disease and eliminate it entirely, or suppressing the total number of infections over the whole course pf the pandemic.’ (In Covid’s Wake, p 67)

In my own city of Belfast, the local hospital was converted into a ‘Nightingale Hospital’ for Covid-19 patients and apparently more or less closed for most of everything else. While claiming that Covid-19 would close it if it was not protected, it partially closed itself. Cancer patients could die but no Covid-19 patient could be refused. Yet even this stupidity did not give pause for thought that this whole policy was the latest example of the ‘madness of crowds.’ Moral panics demand that doubters are immoral and with so much mainstream opinion on-side it is easy to excuse the left who supported it, except it was a failure; they demanded even more of the same, and they ignored, when they weren’t denouncing, alternative voices.

Forward to part 2

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 79 – Universality (1)

Posted on March 23, 2026 by irishmarxism

In one of Marx’s earliest writings, the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in 1843-4, he asks the question: ‘Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?’

‘Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.’

The idea of universality and how it may be constituted is a central feature of Marx’s views, one that is acclaimed, as in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and also implicitly or explicitly rejected by supporters of identity politics, multiculturalism, postmodernism, religious fundamentalism, and nationalism etc.

The defenders of the rights of particular groups by virtue of their identity as being a member of the of that group are often in turn supported by those who would also proclaim support for human rights that are not based on these grounds. No doubt many would argue their compatibility, but if the particular rights claimed by the former were such as to be merely expressions of human rights, then no particular rights would need to be demanded.

This is not primarily a problem of these particular rights not being wholly consistent with that of more general human rights, but of the reality of humanity being fractured and divided in reality. The generality of human rights cannot recognise this so become an abstract moral claim that is continually eulogised and venerated but cannot be effected without particular claims being executed.

For Marx, it is the interests of the working class–the proletariat–that are compatible with and can bring about general human emancipation. It is for this reason that Marxists do not cloak their politics in the language of human rights, because their enactment requires recognition of the grounds that would permit them and the struggle required to realise them. Marxists are often dismissive of claims made on the grounds of human rights because they are made hypocritically by those who defend the grounds that necessarily impose oppression in the first place. For Marx, the particular claims of the proletariat are universal ones because these include the abolition of itself, of the grounds of its particular oppression through the abolition of all classes.

The grounds for its particular claims must thus form the basis for the emancipation of all of society, and we have written about these extensively already. In The German Ideology Marx writes:

‘This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless”, and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development.’

‘And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones.’

‘Without this, (i) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism.’

Marx argues that these are the grounds for a real universality of freedom that previous ruling classes have proclaimed but could never represent:

‘For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.’

The character of the universality of the working class as the new ruling class lies in it being the working majority of society and the nature of the appropriation of society’s powers that it will accomplish, based on the universal development of these powers, including the power of the working class itself:

‘Thus, things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence. This appropriation is first determined by the object to be appropriated, the productive forces, which have been developed to a totality and which only exist within a universal intercourse. From this aspect alone, therefore, this appropriation must have a universal character corresponding to the productive forces and the intercourse.’

We should not pass without noting that when Marx speaks of the working class making a revolution, and of the universal character of this revolution, his interest is not in a uniform collective, one alien to the individual and her or his freedom. For Marx, the abolition of classes is necessary to permit the freedom of the individual that capitalism and its liberal philosophy claims but destroys in reality. After the previous passage he therefore goes on to say:

‘The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves.’

How this is achieved is what constitutes working class politics that is the realm of Marxism:

‘Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all. This appropriation is further determined by the manner in which it must be effected. It can only be effected through a union, which by the character of the proletariat itself can again only be a universal one, and through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, without which the revolution cannot be accomplished; and in which, further, the proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.’

The concept of universality therefore has profound ramifications:

‘The individuals who rule in these conditions — leaving aside the fact that their power must assume the form of the state — have to give their will, which is determined by these definite conditions, a universal expression as the will of the state, as law, an expression whose content is always determined by the relations of this class, as the civil and criminal law demonstrates in the clearest possible way. Just as the weight of their bodies does not depend on their idealistic will or on their arbitrary decision, so also the fact that they enforce their own will in the form of law, and at the same time to make it independent of the personal arbitrariness of each individual among them, does not depend on their idealistic will.’

The state is today held up as the organ of the universal interest, as representing the interest of society as a whole. There can be no more dreadful mistake, as not only does the state and the bureaucracy that it entails have its own interests, but these are bound tightly to those of the ruling class. It is a mistake as common as it is egregious, proclaimed repeatedly even by those who claim to be followers of Marx.

As Marx notes: ‘actual private interests, etc., etc., are expressed as universal interests, descend to the level of mere idealising phrases, conscious illusion, deliberate hypocrisy. But the more their falsity is exposed by life, and the less meaning they have to consciousness itself, the more resolutely are they asserted, the more hypocritical, moral and holy becomes the language of this normal society.’ (All quotations from The German Ideology, Marx and Engels)

The one hundred and seventy-five years since Marx penned these words has witnessed hundreds of millions of deaths under the banner of universal interests in the guise of nationalism, the ‘national interest’ and wars for ‘human rights’. At the same time the ideologues of capitalism have damned the explicit call for real universality as idealistic and totalitarian, if not actually impossible. Recovering the idea of universality as argued by Marx is therefore necessary but can only succeed if the politics of its creation through the working class is defended and advanced practically.

Back to part 78

Ukraine, Iran and World War III

Posted on March 10, 2026 by irishmarxism

Volodymyr Zelensky has said that World War III has already started. If so, Ukraine is fighting it, supported by Western imperialism, which means that the ‘left’ supporters of Ukraine have already picked a side. From the point of view of opposing the further development of this war they are worse than useless.

Its development includes attacks on Venezuela, and now once again on Iran. In the first day this involved the destruction of an elementary school, killing over one hundred young girls, barely acknowledged with a shrug and a lie, plus the sinking of an unarmed Iranian ship with its sailors left to drown. This is a war crime that even the Nazis adhered to at the start of World War II. As one commentator noted the US had “now dropped below that level.”

This statement would be true were the word ‘now’ removed. While each atrocity is treated as a singular act of barbarity with its own characteristics, it is unfortunately the case that this level is all too familiar. It is not only ‘now’ that US imperialism, its Zionist attack dog and the ‘civilised’ European states have involved themselves in atrocity. What is worse than a rolling genocide in which ‘peace’ is declared as a real estate project to build a golden holiday resort over the ashes of the dead?

The working class is constantly invited to compartmentalise the world into discrete and separate events that are unrelated, so that they are unable to understand or remember them as more than individual examples of immoral turpitude. The foreign policies of states are somehow different from domestic policy, one foreign policy has nothing to do with another, and what happened in the past stayed there.

The ‘left’ supporters of Ukraine excel in this–western imperialism is condemned in relation to Palestine and Iran while approved for support for Ukraine. It supports a Ukraine that supports the attack on Iran and states that it wants to be a “big Israel” in Europe. It now also seeks to provide help to the reactionary and authoritarian Arab states collaborating with the attack. Yet the pro-Ukraine left justify their position by claiming a war between democracy and authoritarianism.

The authoritarian policies of Trump and Starmer demonstrate what a deception it is to provide political support to any imperialist state. Inconsistent opposition to imperialism can only be justified by claiming that imperialism itself is inconsistent: not an irradicable feature of capitalism but a choice that sometimes means imperialist war is progressive.

Authoritarian politics inside the West is directly related to its foreign wars. This is evidenced in country after country: Starmer treats anti-genocide protesters as terrorists; the German state represses Palestine supporters, and Trump unleashes State paramilitaries on the working class while elected not to engage in foreign wars.

In Ukraine, credentials for the good fight against authoritarianism include the ban on opposition parties and media; martial law; the ‘busification’ of men into the army; the conscription of the working class and poor while the sons of the rich and connected are free, and millions seeking escape to avoid the draft.

In Ireland, the Irish bourgeoisie trumpets its anti-colonial history while the state has become an integral part of imperialism. Shannon airport has become an important hub for US supply of war material to Israel; the Irish Central bank has facilitated the sale of Israeli bonds that have helped finance the genocide, and booming trade with Israel has made it that state’s second biggest trading partner.

The Irish pretence at neutrality is increasingly an obstacle to the state’s international political role aligning with its economic. This is why the ‘threat’ from Russia, like everywhere else in Europe, is paraded as justification for massive rearmament with the objective of joining NATO. The Irish left defends ‘neutrality’ and opposes joining while much of it supports Ukraine’s war for NATO membership and the arming of it by the alliance.

Western hypocrisy in relation to the attack on Iran finds refuge in its denunciation of the repressive character of its state while the Western media fixates on questions of the purpose and endgame of Trump’s attack. The crazed and criminal intentions of the Zionist state are simply reported as a natural and accepted condition of that state, which of course is true, but without the moral approbation it would normally entail.

The dismay among media commentators that there is a complete lack of strategy in Trump’s actions, and no endgame ,fails to understand that war is itself a strategy, albeit an inadequate one, and that the inter-imperialist rivalry that lies behind it does not have an end outside of human catastrophe or an end to imperialism itself.

We have seen one attack on Iran end without resolution and there may be another. The weakening of it can be expected to continue in any event, as one aspect of exerting US power against China and its Russian ally. The remaining power of the US is displayed both by its attack on Iran together with the relative weakness of the Russian and Chinese responses, alongside the extreme reluctance to ‘put boots on the ground’, and the analogous but opposite situation in Ukraine.

The endless horror of war requires greater censorship and repression at home. The Russian invasion cannot be mentioned without it being called ’unprovoked’, ignoring the obvious provocations by NATO and Ukraine, while the word ‘unprovoked’ disappears from the dictionary when describing the attack by the US and Israel on Iran.

This is obvious propaganda. It has largely succeeded in relation to the war in Ukraine but not regarding genocide in Gaza, and many can also see the hypocrisy involved in the attack on Iran. It doesn’t translate into opposition because there is no pre-existing political opposition to imperialism that can navigate the cascading conflicts and present an alternative, although this is simply to declare the current weakness of socialism.

We have already noted the stupidity of much of the Irish left in opposing the push to Irish NATO membership but supporting the Ukraine war for it. The rest of the Western left supporting Ukraine must explain how it can oppose imperialist rearmament while calling for more weapons to Ukraine that require it. Why doesn’t it support Russian arms to Iran since it is the subject of an unprovoked attack by imperialism? That way it could demonstrate its otherwise ridiculous claim not to be ‘campist’ by supporting the US against Russia in Ukraine and Russian against the US in Iran. Instead of opposing both it could achieve this feat by the truly remarkable device of supporting both!

The propaganda succeeds because the invasion should be opposed but not by supporting the Ukrainian state in its alliance with western imperialism, which began before the invasion. In addition, the Iranian regime is brutal and reactionary, but US imperialism has paraded its callous cruelty with bombastic pride since the start of its attack. Without a working class perspective there is no third force or policy to consistently pose a coherent response.

The petty bourgeoisie, with moralistic beliefs, is incapable of overcoming in politics the limitations of its social position that reduces social questions to good versus bad without any deeper social critique. No understanding can arise from it of the differences between the Ukrainian state, its people or its working class and that they should be considered to have separate and opposed interests. When the Ukrainian state unites with imperialism; its corruption involves its bourgeoisie siphoning off millions of dollars of aid; when it attacks working class people in the street to cart them off to the front; when it celebrates the fascist units in its armed forces–all this does not fit the desired narrative of a good victim, so is effectively ignored.

In Iran, the perceived need not to ‘complicate’ the narrative leads to reluctance to separate the interests of the Iranian state and its regime from that of the Iranian people and its working class. Yet the reality that they are not the same was proved by the regime killing thousands of protesters only a couple of weeks ago. The idea that these were all Mossad agents shows only the susceptibility of many to the view that only the Iranian regime and its imperialist enemy matter. That opposition to one means support for the other. Yet the future of Iran and its people depend on this not being true.

For many on the left old formulas of ‘self-determination of nations’ and ‘anti-imperialism’ show only that they seek to hit a target but miss the point. The socialist movement has witnessed many imperialist wars, and it is now some time since they held up the banner of socialism as the only way to stop them.

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 78 – the importance of labour to universal emancipation

Posted on March 7, 2026 by irishmarxism

Behind the decisive importance of the development of the productive forces and the potential abolition of classes, which provide the grounds for the end of capitalist exploitation and social oppression, lies the fundamental importance of labour in understanding human society.

In the ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, (Marx, in Early Writings, Penguin, pp. 279–400) Marx stated that ‘The whole of what is called world history is nothing more than the creation of man through human labour’:

‘The first premise of all human existence, and therefore of all history…[is] that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history’. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life.’

This is just as true today, although it would be an obvious mistake to see ‘production’ and the ‘needs’ it addresses purely in terms of the creation of goods and services necessary for bare minimum existence, or even in terms of modern ‘consumer society.’

What is consumed has to be produced:

‘Through estranged labour man not only produces his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to alien and hostile powers; he also produces the relationship in which other men stand to his production and product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts , p 279–400.)

Production thus involves not just the bare existence of humanity but also the form that human society takes, including the relations of production that set out the pattern of exploitation and oppression. Upon this rests the superstructure of society, conditioned by the productive forces and relations:

‘. . . the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ We thus produce not just material (and immaterial) goods and services but also our social, political and ideological institutions, including philosophy, morality and religion etc.

So, when Marx talks about production and needs he is talking about the production of humanity itself, the form that it takes in various societies and the necessary interaction with the rest of nature, of which it is part:

“Labor, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, 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.” (Marx,, Capital, Volume I p133,). The satisfaction of human needs involves the ‘metabolic exchange with external nature’ (Grundrisse p. 528), which refers also to ‘historic needs … created by production itself, social needs’ (ibid p. 527), which are not just of a ‘physical’ nature (Capital Volume 1, pp 275, 341) but also include ‘intellectual and social requirements’ whose extent and number ‘is conditioned by the general level of civilisation’ (Capital: Volume I MECW Vol 35 p181.).

It is in relation to this general level that individuals consider their own position, which makes inequality so corrosive of a person’s subjective and objective wellbeing: ‘our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature’ (Marx,Wage, Labour and Capital)

A number of consequences follow. The first is that the development of humanity’s productive powers create new needs, and human beings “distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.” “The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need . . . leads to new needs and this production of new needs is the first historical act . . . a certain mode of production . . . is always combined with a mode of cooperation” (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp 42, 49, 50).

This form of cooperation can be understood in several ways. First, the organization of production is a historical process involving learning and tools that have been transmitted from one generation to another. Second, every previous historical form of production has involved some division of labour — division between mental and material labour, a gender division of labour, class divisions, racial and ethnic divisions, and a division which assigns different individuals to different tasks in the specific production process and in society as a whole.

Third, human consciousness, intrinsic to production, is itself social, as human consciousness is only possible through language, and language is inherently social. “Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all” (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p 51).

Finally, human production is fundamentally social because human beings are fundamentally social animals. As Sean Sayers puts it: “We are inherently and essentially social beings. We develop our natures . . . only by participating in society. . . . Sociality is inscribed in our very biology” . (Sayers 1998) What this means is not simply that we like to hang out with one another but that our very sense of individuality and the kind of individuality that we have depends on the form of society in which we live. “The human being,” Marx writes in the Grundrisse, “is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon [political animal], not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can only individuate itself in the midst of society” (Marx, Grundrisse p 84).

The Marxist understanding of humanity is thus that the ‘human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.’ These relations are conditioned by the need to produce socially: ‘In work, as we have seen, we produce not only goods but also social relations, and indeed we produce and transform human nature itself. ‘The whole of what is called world history is nothing more than the creation of man through human labour’ (Marx, Economic and philosophical manuscripts, p 400, 423).

In Engels’ ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’ labour is described as ‘the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.’

This creation is to be understood not just in terms of the need to produce in order to survive or to produce the culture we now currently enjoy, but also in terms of basic biological properties of humans that we take for granted and which developed from our evolution within the wider natural world. This includes the development of cooperation and the necessity for language and the development of the specific configuration of the human brain, as the outcome of prior evolutionary changes in the corporeal configuration of hominids, eventually leading to the Homo Sapiens that includes opposable thumbs, bipedalism, binocular vision, etc. (Fracchia, The Capitalist Labour-Process and the Body in Pain, Historical Materialism 16, 2008: p 39)

This development is not, of course, the domain of Marxist theory, but of the natural biological and evolutionary sciences, but which Marxism has been able to build upon to explain the continuing development of humanity through its social organisation. In terms of this development, Marxism perceives that humanity ‘by acting on the external world and changing it, at the same time change[s] his own nature.’ (Marx, Capital Vol. 1)

The development of the forces of production therefore can compel not only alienating labour but the source of what Marx considered real wealth: ‘when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc…. the full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? (Marx, Grundrisse p488)

Central to this is the reduction of necessary labour time, which we explained in the previous post is: ‘that required to reproduce the working portion of society at its given, historically developed, level of subsistence, its standard of living.’ Its reduction allows in the free time made available:

‘The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.’ (Marx, Grundrisse p 705–6)

While the potential exists for the time involved in surplus labour to be transformed into free time, the character of necessary labour time will also change. The existing character of labour as mostly alienating, in which the social and cooperative nature of it is distorted and disfigured, could be transformed by conscious control of the productive forces to the objective of meeting and further developing human needs and powers.

‘I would have the immediate satisfaction and knowledge that in my labour I had gratified a human need, i.e, that I had objectified human nature and hence had procured an object corresponding to the needs of another human being’ (Marx ‘Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy’,Early Writings, pp. 259–78.)

‘Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. (Marx, Capital, Volume III p959)

The complete socialisation of the productive forces of society by the working class abolishing all classes, including itself, is a means, not of limited freedom from oppression – a purely negative objective – but ‘“the full development of human mastery over the forces of nature . . . the absolute working out of [their] creative potentialities . . . the development of all human powers as an end in itself ” (Marx, Grundrisse p488). Such is the claim of Marxism for the universal character of the working class struggle for emancipation.

Back to part 77

Forward to part 79

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 77 – what is ‘economic’ emancipation?

Posted on February 21, 2026 by irishmarxism

Marxism is deemed by some to be deficient because it is held to deal only with ‘economic’ oppression and exploitation, or with class inequality. This view fails because it fails to recognise the depth and scope of the Marxist critique of what this ‘economic’ oppression entails. This, as we noted in the previous post, encompasses the way all of society is structured around how people produce their existence – for which the description of ‘economic’ does not do justice – and which decisively influences other types of oppression.

The inequalities suffered along many axes, such as sex and race, as well as class, are particular outcomes of the limited capacity of society to substantially provide for the needs, both material and psychic, of all its people. This inadequate capacity is due to the limited nature of the productive forces to provide for needs that has been a feature of all previous societies. It was the view of Marx that capitalism had so developed these forces that this was potentially no longer the case but that the relations of production – the relation between classes – was an obstacle to the realisation of this potential and that therefore these relations had to be transformed.

The inequalities that arise from these inadequate forces of production and consequent arrangement of classes gives rise to the social, political and ideological forces that perpetuate and defend these inequalities. These are necessary features of a society in which human freedom and self-development are restricted, and life’s activities are alienated in all the ways previously discussed. To abolish the classes that are entailed by these forces and relations of production requires a revolution against the social, political and ideological forces upon which other oppressions also rest. Without the development of the forces of production that are able to ensure the end of the inequality there can be no end of either women’s oppression, racial oppression or any other.

That none of these can be reduced to the development of the forces of production and class exploitation, does not negate their fundamental and essential conditioning of all oppression. While it may be theoretically possible to conceive of a capitalism with an absence of women’s oppression and racial oppression this does not remove the real requirement for them in the actual world that exists. What is possible in the abstract – a non-gendered or racialised oppression – is not possible when we refuse to abstract from reality all the features of capitalism that make both practically inevitable.

Even if we were to consider that this was not the case, the equal exploitation and oppression of men and women and of the various ethnic and racial groups would not be a step forward to ending the exploitation and oppression of the vast majority of the people of the world, the ruthless competition among the fractions of the exploiters and the wars this provokes, or the violence of the state and other forces necessary to impose this exploitation.

The development of the forces of production and abolition of class provide the grounds for the free development of the needs and powers of all humanity. These considerations arise from the claims by Marx of the importance of labour and production for the way humanity has developed, is developing and will continue to develop given the progression to consciousness of the class that is the bearer of the new relations of production that will sweep away all social oppression.

This was put by Marx and Engels in ‘The German Ideology’ where they first elaborated their overall ideas in 1845:

“In reality, of course, what happened was that people won freedom for themselves each time to the extent that was dictated and permitted not by their ideal of man, but by the existing productive forces. All emancipation carried through hitherto has been based, however, on unrestricted productive forces. The production which these productive forces could provide was insufficient for the whole of society and made development possible only if some persons satisfied their needs at the expense of others, and therefore some — the minority — obtained the monopoly of development, while others — the majority — owing to the constant struggle to satisfy their most essential needs, were for the time being (i.e., until the creation of new revolutionary productive forces) excluded from any development.”

The importance of the productive forces and the class relations engendered can easily be appreciated by looking at their development through history:

‘Not only do the objective conditions change in the act of reproduction, e.g. the village becomes a town, the wilderness a cleared field, etc., but the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language.’ (Marx, K. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin/New Left Review).

The agrarian household of precapitalist society was a highly self-sufficient unit, producing almost everything it required for itself, with limited needs and limited means of satisfying them and consequently limited overall cultural development.

Today’s capitalist mode of production involves a particular set of relations of production, as set out in Engels introduction to Marx’s Wage, Labour an Capital:

“And this is the economic constitution of our present day society: it is the working class alone which produces all values. For value is only another expression for labour, that expression, whereby, in our present day capitalist society is designated the amount of socially necessary labour contained in a particular commodity. These values produced by the workers do not, however, belong to the workers. They belong to the owners of the raw materials, machines, tools, and reserve funds, which allow these owners to buy the labour-power of the working class. From the whole mass of products produced by it, the working class, therefore, receives back only a part for itself.”

All the goods and services produced in society, and that define our civilisation at both its most basic and advanced level, are produced by the working class but do not belong to it. They are owned and controlled by capital, embodied in the relationship of the capitalist class to the working class. These productive forces, of labour, equipment etc, will only be engaged in production if to do so provides sufficient profit for capital, so that the labour of the working class will be wasted if it does not. Wasted because of the result of previous labour in the form of machinery, equipment, workplaces etc. lying idle, and wasted in that the working class will be unemployed if these forces are not set to work.

Even should they be set to work the greater the productive forces created by the working class the greater the power standing over them under the control of the capitalist class. Not only their employment but how they are employed, the hours worked and working conditions will be determined by the capitalist class as will what is produced and for whom.

The profits appropriated from the employment of labour both limits the income of workers and therefore the share of production that is to their benefit, while the production of luxuries that workers will never be able to afford will naturally be increased to meet the demand of those who have profited from the workers’ labour. Such a society determines all the inequalities in the provision of resources in all its aspects: in the consumption of goods and services; in the subjection to alienating and oppressive labour; in the time and energy available to fully enjoy life, and in the many social maladies that naturally must arise from such a society, including degradation of physical and mental health; violence and aggression and compulsive and addictive behaviour.

Necessary labour is that required to reproduce the working portion of society at its given, historically developed, level of subsistence, its standard of living, while surplus labour is production above and beyond this, which creates the basis for a privileged group of non-workers. ‘The creation of surplus labour on one side corresponds to the creation of minus-labour, relative idleness (or nonproductive labour at best) on the other’ (Marx 1858: Grundrisse 401n).

So, too, this surplus labour creates the basis upon which ‘higher’ leisure activities have developed, allowing other classes to engage in cultural and intellectual pursuits without the requirement to produce their own means of subsistence. ‘The labour of the mass has [been]…the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few [has been the condition] for the development of the general powers of the human mind’ (ibid.: 705).

On the other hand, the gigantic development of the forces of production today determines how they can be further developed so that the overall cultural level of society, that includes everyone in it, can be raised:

‘Modern universal intercourse cannot be controlled by individuals, unless it is controlled by all. This appropriation is further determined by the manner in which it must be effected. It can only be effected through a union, which by the character of the proletariat itself can again only be a universal one, and through a revolution. (The German Ideology’ p. 88 in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works. Vol. 5)

It is the ‘historical destiny’ of capitalism to create ‘such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need’, and also through ‘the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations’ the development of ‘general industriousness’ in these new generations (Marx 1858: Grundrisse p. 325).

‘Capitalism has developed ‘the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces, etc…. The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as humanity’s own nature. The absolute working out of his creative potentialities.’ (Marx 1858: Grundrisse p. 488)

The universality of needs applies universally–such is the scope and the grounds upon which the purported limited nature of ‘purely economic’ emancipation rests.

Back to part 76

Forward to part 78

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 76 – the Universal class

Posted on February 11, 2026 by irishmarxism

When most people come to oppose capitalism they do so in recognition of the oppression which they personally suffer or see in others, giving rise to more than sorrow or despair but a visceral reaction against it. The various oppressions perpetuated under capitalism are identified and given names, such as women’s oppression and sexism, racial oppression and racism, the oppression of gay people and homophobia, while the poor are those who suffer from poverty and inequality.

When Marx started to develop his understanding of society and its oppression, and how it had been understood by philosophers before him, he asked the question–in critiquing the German philosopher Hegel’s Philosophy of Right–what was ‘the possibility of a German emancipation?’

He answered: ‘In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it . . . a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.’

While starting from the nature of the working class’s suffering and oppression he quickly argued that this class was the means by which all social suffering and oppression could be dissolved. The ‘radical chains’ oppressing the working class gave rise to interests that encompassed the abolition of all social oppression ‘through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, without which the revolution cannot be accomplished; and in which, further, the proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.” (Marx and Engels The German Ideology MECW Vol 5 p 88)

The universal character of the working class is central to Marxism but, as we noted at the beginning, it is often through recognition of different oppressions that opposition to capitalism arises, with the various forms treated as separate and subject to different causes and prominence. This arises partly from starting from the particular suffering incurred and the salience at any particular time. As has been noted before, the oppression of Jewish women in Germany from 1933 to the Holocaust was determined by their being Jews, not women, while the oppression of Palestinians by the state of Israel, claiming to be the state of all Jews, is the result of national oppression.

However, accounts based on theories of ethnic, religious, women’s, or national oppression cannot explain why all of them have occurred and still exist, how they can be ended, and what the alternative was in the 30’s and is now. The answer to these questions rests on a cogent class analysis and alternative to capitalism, including in its imperialist form, and the replacement by a society ruled by the working class.

In the two examples referenced, it is clear that the working class and socialism is an alternative to German imperialism and its Nazi ideology, and to the settler colonial Israeli state, its US imperialist sponsor, and the ideology of Zionism that justifies their actions. This obviously does not mean that a working class–socialist answer is universally accepted but it can readily be acknowledged even by those who do not accept its arguments that socialism provides a relevant analysis and offers an alternative.

This is not the case with many opponents of other forms of oppression, for whom the working class and its interests, expressed in a socialist programme, is undesirable, irrelevant or not a primary concern. There is no claim on their part to be universal in the sense put forward by Marx.

If they do not identify capitalism as the problem, they often damn capitalism in such a way that they argue that the bad bits that engender women’s oppression or racial oppression etc. can be removed, indulging an understanding of capitalism that does not permit its abolition but envisages it continuing, with different nomenclature covering up its continued existence. What is proposed is therefore just a reform of capitalism but with some changed secondary characteristics that allow it be called non-patriarchal, non-racist, anti-colonial, social-democratic, mixed economy, or simply ‘democratic’ but with no fundamental change to the economic and social system, and therefore no fundamental political change either.

Of course, there are always those for whom a more equal and just capitalism is the objective, in which case, for them, the exploitation and oppression of the working class either does not exist, can be sufficiently ameliorated, or is unimportant; a capitalism guaranteeing gender, racial and other social equality is enough. Class oppression would then have no biased outcomes based or sex or race etc.

Others who might have sympathy with the emancipation of the working class may consider that socialism does not directly address the particular oppression which is their primary concern, whether it be women’s oppression or racism, and they therefore prioritise these. Often, this entails the view that the exploitation and oppression of the working class involves economic oppression, which might sit alongside others, but which has no claim to priority, never mind any pretence to universality.

For Marxists, however, none of this subverts the validity of the proletariat as the universal class whose emancipation involves not only its own emancipation but that of other oppressed groups, including all those within its own ranks. This involves assertion of the importance of socialist revolution to working class emancipation, and that its scope cannot be encompassed in some notion of purely economic emancipation but involves the complete reordering of society and all its social relationships, which no other perspective of liberation can promise.

Marxists claim this because, among other reasons, of their understanding of what capitalism entails, which other ‘anti-capitalists’ do not. This is why Marx recognised the revolutionary character of the capitalist mode of production and why simple anti-capitalism is not at all an adequate designation of what an alternative is. He would certainly not have endorsed the slogan “another world is possible” as doing not much more than begging more questions than it answers. As the text of The Communist Manifesto makes clear, not even all socialisms are adequate, and some were positively reactionary, although that too, like the universal character of the working class, is no longer in fashion. Some values, such as pluralism, have been made absolute.

It means that the revolutionising of social relations by working class revolution involves not just economic liberation of the working class but the abolition of all classes including the working class itself. The complete reordering of the economic and social basis of society involves changes to all aspects of it:

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ (Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. 1859 Marx)

The working class revolution and its emancipation therefore does not just upturn economic and socials relations but also the entire superstructure of society including the state and intellectual life generally – the ideas people have of themselves, of others and of society generally. This leads not just to the abolition of classes and therefore exploitation and oppression but also of the state and its oppression and repression.

The work quoted at the start of this post recalled Marx’s critique of Hegel’s idea of the universal interests of society being represented by the state, while he opposed this and saw the state as a separate and alien force that was a mechanism of class oppression that would no longer be required in a classless society. Its non-repressive functions would no longer be the prerogative of bureaucrats in a body standing apart and on top of society but would be absorbed into it and become the activity of everyone directly involved in those functions.

In this he fought against those socialists who also thought that emancipation would come from outside, including the followers of Proudhon and Robert Owen, who believed that co-operative schemes devised by enlightened reformers would be the workers’ salvation, or those like Blanqui and Weitling for whom freedom would come from the revolutionary conspiracy of an enlightened few.

It is therefore ironic that today so much of what passes for Marxism envisages the state as the embodiment of emancipation with a vanguard that will make the revolution, encapsulated in the slogan that ‘it is the duty of the revolutionary to make the revolution.’ Many of those opposing Marxism and its claim that the working class is the universal class also rely on the capitalist state to enact the end of the particular oppression they oppose.

Back to part 75

Forward to part 77

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 75 – the dictatorship of the proletariat (4)

Posted on February 2, 2026 by irishmarxism

Like all organisations, the state’s abiding interest becomes its own preservation and health, which interests are separate from that of society. So a new society still marked by commodity production, “just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges”; it cannot be assumed that the interests of the workers’ state will not be inimical to some degree with that of society–or the working class–as a whole. It was steps taken by the Paris Commune to address this that received affirmation from Marx and Engels, even if these were incomplete.

Marx noted that all previous revolutions perfected the state, unlike working class revolution that will seek to break its capitalist form, with the abolition of classes consequently meaning that there is no requirement for its existence–the organisation of the domination of one class by another would become redundant. The dictatorship of the proletariat would itself disappear as there would be no proletariat.

‘One of the first decisions of the Paris Commune was replacement of the standing army and police. The Commune made that catch-word of bourgeois revolutions, cheap government, a reality, by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure—the standing army and State functionarism. Its very existence presupposed the non-existence of monarchy, which, in Europe at least, is the normal incumbrance and indispensable cloak of class-rule. It supplied the Republic with the basis of really democratic institutions. But neither cheap government nor the “true Republic” was its ultimate aim; they were its mere concomitants.’ (Karl Marx The Civil War in France, Collected Works Vol 22 p 334)

What Marx envisaged after the achievement of the political power of the working class was the abolition of the state – as a mechanism of class rule – along with the classes that made it necessary. This would not happen immediately, but neither did it involve the massive expansion of the state and its role, under the claim that the class struggle would intensify as later claimed by Stalinism. Instead the rule of the working class would increasingly involve the takeover of functions previously carried out by the state by society itself.

This would take some time; the working class “know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men.” (Karl Marx The Civil War in France, Collected Works Vol 22 p 335)

The idea that it is the state that would free the working class was therefore alien to Marx and Engels’ politics, never mind the bloated and parasitic place it had in the Stalinist states of the 20^th century. While the workers’ state would deploy political power to defend the collective property of the working class, like all states it would rest on this form of property itself and upon which the working class would in turn base its social power, with the state subordinated to it, ‘not the master but the servant of society’. In any other circumstances the view of both men – that the state would die away – would be impossible, something confirmed by the experience of the Stalinism in the following century.

“When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society – the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society – this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It dies out (Engels Anti-Duhring Vol 25 p268). The state does not therefore become the agent of transformation but “dies out” as this is achieved.

In some marginal notes, in the form of an imaginary conversation, Marx criticised the book Statism and Anarchy by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, throwing more light on what was meant by abolishing the state:

Bakunin – “If there is a state [gosudarstvo], then there is unavoidably domination [gospodstvo], and consequently slavery. Domination without slavery, open or veiled, is unthinkable — this is why we are enemies of the state. What does it mean, the proletariat organized as ruling class?”

Marx – “It means that the proletariat, instead of struggling sectionally against the economically privileged class, has attained a sufficient strength and organisation to employ general means of coercion in this struggle. It can however only use such economic means as abolish its own character as salariat, hence as class. With its complete victory its own rule thus also ends, as its class character has disappeared.”

Bakunin – “Will the entire proletariat perhaps stand at the head of the government?”

Marx – “In a trade union, for example, does the whole union form its executive committee? Will all division of labour in the factory, and the various functions that correspond to this, cease? And in Bakunin’s constitution, will all ‘from bottom to top’ be ‘at the top’? Then there will certainly be no one ‘at the bottom’. Will all members of the commune simultaneously manage the interests of its territory? Then there will be no distinction between commune and territory.”

Bakunin – “The Germans number around forty million. Will for example all forty million be member of the government?”

Marx – “Certainly! Since the whole thing begins with the self-government of the commune.”

Bakunin – “The whole people will govern, and there will be no governed.”

Marx – “If a man rules himself, he does not do so on this principle, for he is after all himself and no other.”

Bakunin – “Then there will be no government and no state, but if there is a state, there will be both governors and slaves.”

Marx – “i.e. only if class rule has disappeared, and there is no state in the present political sense.”

Bakunin – “This dilemma is simply solved in the Marxists’ theory. By people’s government they understand (i.e. Bakunin) the government of the people by means of a small number of leaders, chosen (elected) by the people.”

Marx – “Asine! This is democratic twaddle, political drivel. Election is a political form present in the smallest Russian commune and artel. The character of the election does not depend on this name, but on the economic foundation, the economic situation of the voters, and as soon as the functions have ceased to be political ones, there exists 1) no government function, 2) the distribution of the general functions has become a business matter, that gives no one domination, 3) election has nothing of its present political character.”

(Marx, Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy, Collected Works Vol 24, p518-519)

In response to Bakunin’s argument that a worker, once elected to a post, ceases to be a worker and becomes only a bureaucrat seeking his own aggrandisement, Marx refers to “the position of a manager in a workers’ cooperative factory”. A social authority therefore will still exist but with the existence of collective and cooperative relations of production; the end of the need for the suppression of antagonistic class relations and generalised social equality; the political role as performed by the newly formed (and today by the existing capitalist state) will “die out”. The workers’ state must therefore have a very different dynamic than today’s capitalist one – to shrink and decline rather than expand and grow.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is therefore not a dictatorship in the currently understood sense of that term but is a period of development of society in which the rule of the majority, of the working class, leads to the dying out of the mechanism that makes such a dictatorship possible – the state. The Paris Commune, celebrated by Marx was, he said, a “revolution against the state itself.”

Back to part 74

Forward to part 76

	revolutionaryprogram… on Left reaction to the ‘discover…
	Paul Flannigan on Marxism and Gender Identity Id…
	Paul Flannigan on Ukraine and imperialism after…
	irishmarxism on Karl Marx’s alternative to cap…
	Paul Flannigan on Karl Marx’s alternative to cap…

Sráid Marx

An Irish Marxist Blog