2017 Women’s March in Washington, DC. (Flickr/Vlad Tchompalov)

Socialism is possible because of the socialisation of production through the growth of the productive forces.  Only one agent can accomplish this socialisation such that it is a cooperative and consciously planned development, and is the instrument of the actual producers themselves, the working class.  As these producers are the main productive force in the world the object of the process is the development of the producers themselves, of human development itself.

‘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, which are required to accomplish the appropriation, and the proletariat moreover rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.’ (Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 5 p88)

No other agent can carry out this endeavour, so that only the working class can abolish bourgeois private property through revolution.  This cannot be the more numerous (until very recently) peasantry; some combination of petty producers and peasantry; some combination of women, petty producers and peasantry or of oppressed nationalities, ethnic groups and races etc.  As such, these play no role in the existing relations of production such that they could create a new cooperative society.

As the oppressed their struggle against their subordination must transcend their particular oppression and only as constituents of the working class can they take hold of the means of production to transform class relations, end their own oppression and abolish exploitation.  Only acting as a class can they abolish class in general and rid the world of the material want that lies behind the social inequality of all kinds that provides the basis for continuing social conflict and oppression.  Divorced from class struggle their opposition to their oppression will not ensure its ending, while a class struggle that ignores their oppression cannot promise universal emancipation because the working class would not then be united as a universal class.

The working class is made up of many oppressed forces, including the female half of humanity, so that its struggles must embrace the specific interests of these oppressed groups in order that the working class is united, not as allies but as equal participants in self-emancipation.  Marxism provides the basis for the necessary unity that can overturn racism etc. and not just modify it, for example through equality of races among the capitalist class and elite layers of society, and within the working class itself.

We have explained in many previous posts how human productive activity is central to human development and is key to all social liberation – to the relations between individuals and cooperative control of society; to the growth and transformation of civilisation; freedom from want, removal of alienation and social inequality as the basis of social conflict e.g. sexual oppression and racism; and replacement by social cooperation, the creation of free time that allows for the development of each individual and the creation of a realm of freedom as the grounds of human flourishing.

From all this follows that the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself – the bedrock principle of Marxist politics upon which all else is built. Marx even suggests that unlike previous revolutions in the form of private property, for example from feudal to bourgeois, the appropriation of this by the working class will be easier!

‘The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.’ (Marx Capital Vol 1, Chapter 32)

When the working class puts itself forward as the new ruling class it must make its interests the interests of the new society in general: ‘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 present 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 present them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution comes forward 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, as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.’ (Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 5 p60)

Marx goes on to say that ‘Every new class, therefore, achieves domination only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously; on the other hand the opposition of the non-ruling class to the new ruling class then develops all the more sharply and profoundly. Both these things determine the fact that the struggle to be waged against this new ruling class, in its turn, has as its aim a more decisive and more radical negation of the previous conditions of society than all previous classes which sought to rule could have.’ (Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 5 p61)

In this way the struggle of the working class is more difficult.  We see this in the innumerable struggles of oppressed or subordinated groups who seek their own liberation or emancipation not as a part of this general movement of emancipation but as particular claims, separate and often opposed to the general and universal objectives of emancipation that lies within the working class struggle to abolish capitalism and establish socialism as the rule of the associated producers.

This is illustrated not only by the partial struggles against discrimination and domination that do not seek to go beyond equality within capitalism – of nations, races, and sexes etc. – but also of those supposedly class struggles, in reality economistic struggles, that determinedly do not go beyond particular claims within the bounds of capitalism.  Within the latter the universal (and political) character of the struggle of the working class is consciously rejected by typically reformist politics that nevertheless often presents itself as socialism.

It is no accident that these ‘pure’ working class struggles – over employment or higher wages etc. – often look not to the power of the working class but to the capitalist state as their saviour, so that the state is certified as the universal representative of society; against which proposition Marx began his search for an alternative that became his journey to working class emancipation.  This tendency, existing as a function of capitalism and the state itself, was enormously strengthened by the history of the working class movement. As Marx noted in The Communist Manifesto The proletariat goes through various stages of development . . . If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies . . .’

The development of capitalism has demonstrated that this subordination of the working class, and its movement, to the bourgeoisie is repeated again and again.  On the war in Ukraine, for example, many ‘socialists’ have lined up behind their bourgeoisie and state on behalf of the cause of one of its constituent allies (Ukraine) on the basis of fighting the enemy (Russia) of its purported enemy (its own bourgeoisie.)

The underdevelopment of the working class led to the early attempts to establish a socialist society failing and inevitably falling back on the state in circumstances in which the class was a minority and only the state could impose any sort of ‘universality’, as in the direction of society and the bending of social and economic arrangements to achieve it.  This is the summary story of the Russian revolution and the ‘model’ of state socialism that it proclaimed, and which further contributed to the view of the state as the carrier of the universal interests of the working class.

These became the ‘digressions, the temporary and local aberrations’ that Engels mentioned the day after Marx died, which were ‘inevitable’ but which, upon his death, ‘will now proliferate.’  And proliferate they have. Even the most radical interpretations of the first state-wide attempt to create a new socialist society often fail to recognise the lesson that it is not even a healthy workers’ state that will avoid the bureaucratic deformities and degeneration experienced and then celebrated as Stalinism.  It is the working class directly controlling society’s social and economic arrangements with the role of the state to defend them – not constitute them – that will do so.

Capitalism involved the general destruction of feudal and other constraints that rendered people unfree not only socially but also legally so that in both ways they were bereft of individuality.  It permitted the idea of individual freedom and thus the idea of its realisation, even if its social arrangements effectively circumscribed it and strangled its development.  It has shown that it cannot yet eradicate all ‘the ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions’ inherited from previous medieval societies that Marx proclaimed in his sweeping anticipatory judgement in The Communist Manifesto.

It also, however, created the grounds not only for the perpetuation of various forms of existing social oppression but also the possibility of recognising them and struggling against them.  This is the basis for new ideologies and movements of oppressed groups that realise that the possibility for ending their oppression now exists.  In themselves they have no universal aims because they seek only sectional liberation, but their existence not only implies that the universal emancipation promised by the working class must account for them but that it must encompass them or the emancipation that the latter claims is not universal.

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