Monthly Archives: February 2026

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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 20th 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.”

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