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