Monthly Archives: July 2026

The grounds for the achievement of universal emancipation       

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Part 81 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism.

The abolition of capitalism and the social revolution that would make society the expression of the needs of the majority would quickly and radically start to reduce inequality and alienation.  This would be the result of the relations of production between individuals being transformed from class relations of exploitation to cooperative relations between individuals.  It would eliminate the material basis for the huge inequality arising from the monopoly ownership of productive resources that skews production and consumption on behalf of the capitalist class, while it would allow production to be directly planned for the needs of the majority.

This control would begin to eliminate the alienation that exploitation, atomisation and lack of solidarity create while developing the bonds of cooperation based on the basis of a cooperative economy that allows the conscious determination of social priorities.  Reducing material inequality through creation of mechanisms that enable everyone to engage in setting future needs would reduce social alienation and antagonism upon which social problems and certain patterns of individual harmful behaviour are created.

In this context the division of the working class, now no longer a class but a society of associated producers, would no longer have any interest in division and conflict based on race or nationality or any other particular individual attribute that is irrelevant to the cooperative solidarity of society.  The development of the forces of production that will erode and then erase inequality will be the product of associated producers for whom race, nationality, sex or sexual orientation etc. will not be socially or politically relevant. 

Inequality will not be abolished all at once, as the forces and relations of production develop but remain insufficient and the effects of capitalism on the consciousness of the working class persist, with its quota of ignorance and prejudice.  However, the working class/associated producers will no longer have the same material interests in reproducing the oppressive divisions that currently exist and which the existence of a capitalist class and its state foment.

All this is not the product of the creation of a preconceived ideal society but will be a process created by revolution through which many of the best characteristics of solidarity must already have been created for such a revolution to be achieved.  The social revolution required is a transformative leap, in which the achievement of political power is the decisive enabler, but it is not one without necessary prior development or with continued evolution thereafter.

In the Preface to a contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx wrote that ‘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.’  Engels also wrote that the abolition of classes will also make possible “a really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of them.” (Anti-Duhring)

The creation of a cooperative economy will thus be the basis for the transformation of all of society including the mass consciousness that will arise from it.  Not only will economic and social inequality and oppression be eroded and erased, but the state as a mechanism of force and oppression will suffer the same fate as its useful society-wide functions become those of society itself, now governed and controlled by the associated producers.  Upon this basis reactionary ideas can recede and shrivel along with the oppressive behaviours they express. 

The continued existence of capitalism limits and impedes richer forms of individual self-realisation and higher forms of social development.  The unfettering of the forces of production will spur the more or less rapid transformation of the current stunting division of labour, including the division between those who make decisions and those subject to them.  Engels argued that removing capitalist relations of production would ‘secure for every member of society . . . an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties”

No other element, section or part of society can institute new relations of production that have the potential to abolish class exploitation and oppression, reduce material inequality and develop the forces of production in a way that can permit this free development, whether this be increased consumption, the protection of humanity from climate change, freedom from “non-class” oppression, increased healthy longevity, cultural development, or free time to pursue individual ambitions.  To the greatest degree the decisive force of production is the working class itself, and its development is the transformation of the working class by its own actions.

It would be obtuse to counterpose the rights of specifically oppressed groups – often misleadingly called minorities – to this perspective, for these ‘minorities’ consist of the majority of the working class, not just in world terms but in every society.  Socialism and the revolution needed to bring it about must be their creation, or it will not be at all.  It is hardly conceivable that particular needs within this majority will not be part of the objective of universal emancipation. The problem is not what the ending of class exploitation will do for women, people of colour, or the millions of poor in the world etc., but why this majority would not seek liberation and emancipation for themselves, as constituting the majority of the working class, through making this revolution and creating a new society.

Only through these ‘minorities’ liberating themselves can there be a united working class and only by a united working class can their liberation be achieved.  Domination and exploitation constitutive of “non-class” oppressions, such as those based on sex, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc will not be ended within capitalism while the theoretical possibility that it could be would still leave them subject to all the domination and subjugation of their class compatriots.

That the majority of those subject to “non-class” oppression are working class or poor is illustration of the universal nature of the working class, and that the general erasure of inequality and reactionary consciousness is only possible under a cooperative socialist society is another.

That Marx did not develop a fuller understanding of the specific character of many “non-class” oppressions is no reason to believe that the working class emancipation he sought was for white men only.  This idea is absurd.  His championing of the struggle against slavery and his, and Engels, many comments on the oppression of women are testament.  When they speak of the free and full development of rich individuality this could not possibly be restricted to only some types of individuals.

The criticisms of what Marx didn’t write about women, racial subjugation and national oppression join a long list that includes finishing his life’s work Das Kapital; writing a book on dialectics; clarifying his ideas about what he meant by class; heading off future criticisms of ‘eurocentrism’ by developing his study of non-Western societies, and writing up an analysis of nationalism.  You could add to the list, but it wouldn’t get you any nearer to a decisive critique of him that you might seek to make.  Marx was notorious for missing deadline’s – wanting to read everything before committing to paper, but then, who knows what he would have come out with without doing so? One may as well ask why he didn’t have a more robust constitution and live longer.

The real point is not that Marx did not leave all the answers, as if new questions would not arise after his death, but that what is now referred to as his research agenda was good enough to open many questions and point to persuasive answers, and that these do not include a lot of the rubbish that some (many!) of his self-declared disciples have published later.

The relationship between “non-class” oppression and ‘the economical emancipation of the working classes’ as ‘the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means’ is not settled by the above, and nor is the nature and scope particularly of women’s oppression, which we will come to later.  What the treatment above does is summarise the overall project of Marx and Engels that sustains their claim.

Back to part 80

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 80 – Universal Emancipation

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We noted at the end of the previous post that the state and nationalism are held up as the instrument and ideology of society as a whole and that they manifest the individual’s general and universal interests and will.  Just as the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights are the declared principles of today’s capitalist system so were the Rights of Man and the Citizen the banner of the bourgeoisie in Marx’s day.  Of course, states are national states and in competition with each other to varying degrees, while the state has its own interests and defends the class system on which it is based.  Its nationalism requires other states and their nationalism in order to make sense. The ideology of capitalism in general still appeals to rampant individualism, inequality and Adam Smith’s invisible hand, in which free markets create incentives for the universally self-interested to act unintentionally in the general interest. The claims of capitalism to represent general and universal interest are thus riven with contradictions.

For Marx, we have seen that the universal requirement to labour, and creation of the cooperative relations that develop the productive forces, are the grounds for universal development that must break through the limitations and restrictions of capitalism.  Having no property to defend itself (understood as the means of producing a livelihood) the working class has no interest in extending exploitation but rather only in collectively ending it.  This is the basis for abolishing alienation in general and rooting out the various forms of oppression that exist such as the oppression of women and of racial groups.

The rule of the working class can progressively end the injurious aspects of the division of labour and the alienation it engenders: the subordination of women through the sexual division of labour, and the international division of labour that is the product of imperialism.  This requires the working class to live and act as an international class, one opposed to national divisions, and itself the objective product of capitalist universalisation of exploitation, often labelled as ‘globalisation’.

In The Communist Manifesto Marx presented an alternative to other existing ‘socialisms’, which then existed and suffered from the ‘undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation’.  Two consequences of this were that existing socialist thinkers and movements appealed ‘to society at large, without distinction of class’ while ‘caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.’

Today, when class struggles have inflicted a string of defeats on the working class, many socialist thinkers and movements have reverted to these early responses, with repeated setbacks hardening their conceptions which are then passed down to succeeding generations. So, we have the state as the (potential) representative of working class interests (through such things as ‘left’ governments) and socialism as the product mainly of a suffering working class (from economic crises, austerity, discrimination and poverty etc.).

Socialism, when it is considered at all, is now routinely presented as a response to oppression, with a more recent tendency to seek to sanctify the oppressed with the degree of suffering experienced and then to present responses specific to their particular claims and interests. Alternatives to the working class look to address the diversity of oppression through the varieties of those oppressed acting on their own behalf – at most with ‘allies’ or in ‘coalitions’ – by making advances through the state against discrimination and inequality. They do not start by seeking the unity of the working class to carry out the tasks Marx reserved for it while recognising that it consists of many of the elements of the various oppressed groups that have specific interests in addition to that of their class.

Historically it is not the most oppressed who create new societies, as Marx’s invocation of the history of class struggle in The Communist Manifesto illustrates:

‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.  Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.’ Yet, slaves, serfs and journeymen did not create new forms of society even as the old disappeared. Within capitalism, ‘society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.’

Classes other than the working class often suffer more than it, often individually or as a whole, but “of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class’.  ‘The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary . . . they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.’

These classes develop ideas that typically permit them to understand society in a way most comfortable to their own role within it, not how they might be the creator of a new one, and justify their outlook in terms that assume and validate ‘common sense’ views, superficial appearances and prejudice.  Modern fractions of the middle class – professional layers or those whose job it is to produce ideas (writers, journalists, teachers and lecturers) can often develop sophisticated ideas that do not in the end challenge capitalism, never mind promise an alternative to it.

Reconstitutions of the middle class can produce newer versions of older petty bourgeois ideas, such as nationalism or fascism, with self-declared progressive responses often dressed up in confused manifestations of previous socialist programmes.  The absence of independent working class positions in their political programmes is the tell-tale sign that what is involved is purely petty bourgeois politics that eschews class struggle and gives primacy to the actions of the state.

‘The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.’ (The Communist Manifesto): ‘All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.’ (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 495)

It is a tribute to the continuing ability of capitalism to revolutionise its forces and relations of production that ideas promising a radical rupture are generated, which nevertheless do not challenge capitalism.  These ideas are often created in universities but reveal their non-threatening character by their rapid adoption by capitalism’s ideological apparatus, through television, newspapers, social media, publishing and big corporations, and most particularly in state bureaucracies.  These ideas have included complete and total opposition to any claim to universalism, often in such a total way as to be self-refuting, including opposition to the idea of truth itself.

Marx argued ‘that the economical emancipation of the working classes is . . . the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means’ while most political movements today that view themselves as progressive have been set up with the belief that this is most definitely not the case. Many calling themselves Marxists unfortunately agree with them.  (Provisional rules of the Association Pp. 14–16 in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 20)

This was Marx and Engels view from some of their earliest writings to the last.  In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx claimed that “the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation” while in The German Ideology the revolution of the working class “leads to the abolition of . . . domination in general”. Towards the end of his life, Engels stated in the Preface to the 1888 English edition of the Communist Manifesto that “a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class — the proletariat — cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class — the bourgeoisie — without, at the same time, and once and for all emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class-distinctions and class-struggles.’

In periods of reaction the social basis of many sections of the petty bourgeoisie leads them into reactionary politics, particularly those engaged with small capital such as farming or small business.  They often exploit themselves and are exploited by larger capitals, or consider themselves oppressed by the demands of the state, which ironically because of this is seen as their potential saviour. In their own way they suffer from capitalism and its socialisation into huge multinationals and monopolies but do not see these as harbingers of the alternative.

Under the rule of the working class majority smaller capitals will lose the unilateral power to exploit their workers – through their workers being able to join the majority of their class in working, controlling and managing their own workplaces; while the petty bourgeoisie will either cease to see their own class existence as small capitals to be to their benefit, or find that they are unable to compete with the larger worker-owned enterprises.  It is their strained existence under capitalism and the promise of a non-exploitative society that forms the basis for their social subsumption into the working class and the universal character of the emancipation that it promises them and others.

Back to part 79

Forward to part 81