The self-emancipation set out in the previous post is a result of what the working is, what its essential nature is.  At the same time it is the result of struggle, including its struggle to become aware of its nature and the historical tasks that result from it.  It is not therefore a question of inevitability, as in a dictionary definition as ‘sure to occur, happen, or come’, or ‘unable to be avoided, evaded, or escaped.’

Inevitability here means that the essential nature of the working class, as set out in the last number of posts, entails that it will become to a greater or lesser extent aware of its interests, will struggle to defend its interests and will seek to create a society in which these become universal as society is transformed.  This potential can be realised because it is part of the essential nature of the working class, but this potential can be thwarted and destroyed so that the working class is degraded along with the universal interests it represents, entailing the equal degradation of society as a whole.

This view of the working class was expressed early in Marx’s political development when he stated that “Not in vain does it [the proletariat] go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.’

‘Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society today. There is no need to explain here that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity.”  (The Holy Family, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 4 p37)

This ‘life situation’ entails its lack of ownership of ‘bourgeois property’ – the means of producing what is needed to live at a certain standard of civilisation – and the results following of private appropriation of the results of its labour, appearing in the phenomena of economic and political crises, including war; also in the rampant inequality that disfigures and degrades relations between individuals and society as a whole.  The socialisation of this production under capitalism provides the basis of its transformation into the property of the working class who employ the means of production, which is the essential role of the working class.

Placed in this objective situation workers become aware of their existence as a separate class, although this in itself is not class consciousness of separate political interests, or how these must be advanced.  History demonstrates both this awareness, its striving for political expression, and the struggle to make it adequate to the tasks posed to it.  The latter is the struggle to marry the working class to Marxism.

The working class alternative thus arises from the objective nature of the class and the subjective development that arises from this nature, from the struggle to clarify its tasks and struggle for their achievement.  For Marx, socialists could assist in this task of clarification but not substitute its own clarity for it.  This required that they always seek to work and unite with the working class whatever its level of development, as put forward in the section of The Communist Manifesto entitled ‘Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties’.

‘Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; the revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.’ ” (The German Ideology, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 5 p52-53)

The organisation for which The Communist Manifesto was written was therefore to enable the development of this consciousness, including in the organisation itself, and Engels, in his History of the Communist league recorded that ‘The organisation itself was thoroughly democratic, with elective and removable authorities. This alone barred all hankering after conspiracy, which requires dictatorship, and the League was converted—for ordinary peacetime at least—into a pure propaganda society. These new Rules were submitted to the communities for discussion—so democratic was the procedure now followed—then once again debated at the Second Congress and finally adopted . . .’ (On the History of the Communist League, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 26 p321-322)

This attachment to democracy was a consequence of commitment to self-emancipation and in turn an obligation to base its politics on working class independence. This became a constant political struggle for Marx and Engels that continues today.  In a letter to Engels, on 18 February 1865, Marx denounced the idea that the Prussian government would help the workers set up their own cooperatives and excoriated even the idea that the working class should accept it: “the honour of the workers’ party requires that it reject such illusions, even before their hollowness is punctured by experience. The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.’ (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 42 p96). Dependence on the bourgeoisie or its state would make the working class a political nullity.

In this Marx was repeating something he had written eighteen years earlier in 1847 in respect of one German government when he wrote that ‘They delude themselves that the proletariat wishes to be helped, they do not conceive that it expects help from nobody but itself.’ (The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter, Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p96)

The import of this for today’s political struggle is obviously unclear to many.  It is why this blog consists not only of this series of posts on Marx’s alternative to capitalism but also statements on current political struggles, which so often criticise the wrong approach of others who profess to be Marxists.  It is written with the view that these mistakes are partly the result of ignorance of Marx’s views, or an assumption that some programmatic statements by later notable Marxists (or others) have in some way superseded what they said.  However these errors are most often the result of the import of alien ideas the force of which lie not in the ideas themselves but the social forces lying behind them, which often by their power seem to frame the political perspectives available.

Politics based on the independence of the working class does not mean subservience to illusions within the class or backward ideas that exist within it. Commitment to self-emancipation does not mean belief that the workers’ movement or its leaders will always be right and that their failures can be excused, minimised or accepted.  Marx was not afraid to stand against failures, mistakes or outright treachery within the workers’ movement and its leaders but this was not in order to detach himself from it, or seek an alternative to it, but to honestly express his views so that lessons would be learnt from failures, mistakes could be corrected and treachery expunged.  The workers’ movement is not short of any of these today.

From the failure of the Paris Commune in 1871 he wrote of ‘a decisive mistake in not at once marching upon Versailles’ by the Communards Central Committee; that ‘The communal constitution has been mistaken for an attempt to break up into a federation of small States’ due to ‘antagonism of the Commune against the State power . . . mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against over-centralization’.

Marx wrote of ‘Countless mistakes by the revolutionaries’ but he supported and defender the Commune even while he thought beforehand that ‘any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly.’  (The Civil War in France, Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 22 p326, 333 & 509 and Second Address on the Franco-Prussian War, Vol 22 p269)

He summarised the action of the Communards by saying that the working class did not expect miracles from the Commune: ‘They have no ready-made Utopias to introduce par décret du peuple. They 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.’  (The Civil War in France, Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 22 p335)

When it came to treachery, he was also not afraid to take his stand: in one of Marx’s last political struggles against the political degeneration of the German Social Democratic Workers Party and its abandoning of independent working class politics, he and Engels stated:

‘As for ourselves, there is, considering all our antecedents, only one course open to us. For almost 40 years we have emphasised that the class struggle is the immediate motive force of history and, in particular, that the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is the great lever of modern social revolution; hence we cannot possibly co-operate with men who seek to eliminate that class struggle from the movement. At the founding of the International we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself.’ (Marx and Engels. Circular Letter. 17-18 Sept. 1879, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 45 p408)

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