Category Archives: Karl Marx

The need to hate capitalism more

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In the 1970s I used to sell the paper of the International Marxist Group Red Weekly every Saturday afternoon on Union Street in Glasgow at the side entrance of the Central Station. I remember one occasion when a visibly agitated man rushed up to me demanding to know whether I was a communist – ‘Are you a communist?’ ‘Are you a communist?’  He launched into a few remarks I barely took in at the time and don’t remember at all now.  I gathered that he was very angry about something and ‘communism’ was some sort of answer. He then exited as frantically as he had arrived.  I doubt very much he had anything to do with ‘communism’ thereafter.

I was reminded of this minor incident reading China Miéville’s book on Marx’s Communist Manifesto, in which he borrows a phrase employed by someone else, and in a different context, to say that The Communist Manifesto’s “negativity is not negative enough”. ‘It does not hate enough’, (A Spectre Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, p 176)

This appears in a section entitled ‘On Hate’ in which he states that capitalism deserves to be hated, but that “a focus on hatred . . . is fraught, and dangerous territory . . . Hatred, after all, is an emotion that can short-circuit thought and analysis, can segue into violence, and not necessarily with any discrimination’; although he then notes that “hatred, particularly by the oppressed, is inevitable” (p170-171)

Against this he quotes Marx’s favourite maxim – Nihil humani a me alienum puto – nothing human is alien to me, and while he then states that it’s “hardly productive to pathologise hate per se, not least when it’s natural that it arises . . . the very absence of a critical mass of hatred may militate against resistance.”  He then quotes others on the need for ‘class hatred’ – “a radical structural hate for what the world has become” that is not “personal, psychological or pathological hate, but a structural hate.’  However, a hate that is neither personal nor psychological is not an emotion and a ‘structural hate’ must refer to something else entirely if it is to refer to anything at all.

Miéville is correct to refer to a statement about “deliberate hate as a rational category”.  The philosopher Martha Nussbaum noted that “emotions always involve thought of an object combined with thought of the object’s salience or importance; in that sense, they always involve appraisal or evaluation.”  The neurologist Antonio Damasio similarly comments that “Emotions provide a natural means for the brain and mind to evaluate the environment within and around the organism and respond accordingly and adaptively.”

This is the opposite of the view of emotions–that they cloud rationality, which they obviously can, and fits comfortably into the long tradition of Western philosophy focused on what is rational but which exaggerates both the disruptive potential of most emotions and the precision and certainty of human rationality.  Emotions are an evolutionary development of humanity that helps us quickly gather and process information about the world and respond to it accordingly.  

Some have made the comparison of thinking slow and fast, with emotions involving the latter entailing problems associated with ‘snap decisions’ and avoidance of ‘careful deliberation.’  If anyone was to look to Marx for inspiration, they might consider his long years in the British Library in London; his purported need to read all potentially relevant books on a subject before forming a definite view, and this resulting in missed deadlines and much unfinished work left to posterity.

Miéville believes that hate is not only necessary for resistance but “may help not only with strength but intellectual rigour, and of analysis, too” (p173). He quotes an Anglican priest, Steven Shakespeare, quoted above regarding hate’s “dangerous territory”, that it is necessary to be “more discriminatory about hate, where it comes from, where it should be directed, and how it gets captured for the purposes of others.’

So, we are into Goldilocks territory of not too much, and not too little, hate but just the right amount. Or we can appeal to Aristotle’s golden mean; where, for example, courage is a virtue but if taken to excess is recklessness and if too little, cowardice.  “Emotional intelligence” is a modern variation.  Cogitating on how much hate to evoke against capitalism is, however, a pretty unproductive pursuit.

Miéville, however, is particular about determining the need for greater hate, including that “Marx and Engels were too generous in their eulogy to its [capitalism’s] transformation and energetic properties, and to the bourgeoisie itself, as well as about the likelihood of its collapse.” (p175)

It might be more accurate to say that Marx and Engels were too sanguine, optimistic and confident about the overthrow of capitalism (not its collapse) but that they didn’t live to see the development of the workers’ movement or the programmes developed by its various parts that impacted on the outcome of subsequent failures.  The point of this series of posts is not to relay this long and involved history but to set out what their alternative to capitalism was, which should go some way to exposing the reasons for failure so far.

As for Marx and Engels being too generous about the transformational and energetic properties of capitalism, this is simply false; it is in fact one of their most brilliant judgements and predictions, fully confirmed by today’s capitalism and its spread across the globe.

Miéville says we should retain our “shock” at the iniquities that capitalism throws up and that provoke an “appropriate human response, the fury of solidarity, the loathing of such unnecessary suffering . . . We should feel hate beyond words.”  But the feeling of solidarity is also an emotion.  An emotion that we should wish to promote, which is not (simply) a “humane” one but one based on a feeling of class solidarity, to be combined with the emotions of pride in our cause and our movement, and growing confidence in our success.

If there is a deficiency in emotional investment it is in these, which are more vital to our future than learning to hate capitalism that bit more.  No one experiences only one emotion at a time (hence the falsity of the question repeated by Miéville “is your hate pure”); and as we have said, even the most instinctive emotion involves rationality and a degree of thought.

Marx noted, in relation to Miéville’s call that we should retain our “shock”, “fury” and “loathing” that some suffering has not been “unnecessary”, but absolutely necessary for the development not only of humanity in general but of capitalism and the grounds it creates for the subsequent potential for socialism.  Many still cannot get their head round this: that the suffering imposed by capitalism was unavoidable for its birth and development – and in this sense necessary – but that this does not in the least mean we do not cease to damn it and to seek its overthrow.

To claim otherwise – that much of the suffering endured through capitalism was unnecessary must explain a number of things.  How could capitalism birth and develop without suffering?  Is a non-suffering capitalism possible? Is socialism possible without capitalism (and therefore without this suffering but then also without the working class)?  Was all this suffering therefore without any historical meaning, but simply contingent and accidental?  Explain the laws of the development of capitalism and its relation to the possibility of socialism without contradiction and antagonism and therefore suffering!

Marx is criticised in Miéville for his greater criticism of other socialisms than of the bourgeoisie because the former has none of the “ambivalence” that he attaches to the latter. (p176) This “ambivalence”, however, was entirely appropriate in a period in which capitalism was more or less fully developed in only a couple of countries and had yet to supplant the legacies of feudalism.  Apart from recognition of the insights of the original utopian socialists, Marx admonished their succeeding followers because there was no merit in repeating anachronistic nostrums that were now reactionary.

Did Marx and Engels hate capitalism more than Weitling, Proudhon and Bakunin?  This would be a hard claim to sustain, but whose politics is the best guide to ending it, and would their’s have been better had they done so?

The emotion of hate has its (inevitable) place, but this does not mean “we must hate harder than did the Manifesto”; the demand for greater hate (“hate beyond words”) is a substitute for politics.  After all his detour on the need for hate, Miéville says that “Hate is not and cannot be the only or main drive to renewal.  That would be deeply dangerous.  We should neither celebrate nor trust our hate. But nor should we deny it.”  It would have been better had he started and elaborated on this than drop it into the end of a disquisition on how much we must hate more.

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 68

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Understanding ‘Citizen Marx’ 3 of 3

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Engels once said that ‘Marx and I, for forty years, repeated ad nauseam that for us the democratic republic is the only, political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalised and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.’

The context was a claim against him that when ‘the socialist party, will become the majority’ it will ‘then proceed to take power.’  Engels however stated that ‘For a start, I have never said the socialist party, will become the majority and then proceed to take power.  On the contrary, I have expressly said that the odds are ten to one that our rulers, well before that point arrives, will use violence against us, and this would shift us from the terrain of majority to the terrain of revolution . . .’

Responding to the question of what form this power would take – ‘Will it be monarchic, or republican, or will it go back to Weitling’s utopia’, Engels replied that of course the Reichstag deputies are republicans and revolutionaries, the question of a Republic being the most controversial political question in Imperial Germany at that time.

Engels goes on to ask whether it is implied ‘that the German socialists attribute no more importance to the social form than to the political form? Again he would be mistaken. He should be well enough acquainted with German socialism to know that it demands the socialisation of all the means of production. How can this economic revolution be accomplished? That will depend on the circumstances in which our party seizes power, on the moment at which and the manner in which that occurs.’ (Engels, Reply to the Honourable Giovanni Bovio MECW Vol 27 p271)

What Engels is making clear is that the fight for democracy is vital to the struggle of the working class to achieve political power not that it is necessary to have a republic as the first step to communism. Even where the question of a Republic was the unmentionable political issue, the objective was ‘the socialisation of all the means of production.’

On a separate occasion he said that ‘If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power in the form of the democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat . .’ (emphasis added – SM) On the question of a Republic he explains the content of the demand, if it is not possible to employ the term itself: ‘But the fact that in Germany it is not permitted to advance even a republican party programme openly, proves how totally mistaken is the belief that a republic, and not only a republic, but also communist society, can be established in a cosy peaceful way’

‘However, the question of the republic could possibly be passed by. What, however, in my opinion should and could be included is the demand for the concentration of all political power in the hands of the people’s representatives. That would suffice for the time being if it is impossible to go any further.’ (Engels A critique of the draft Social-Democratic programme of 1891, MECW Vol 27 p227)

Engels in his postscript to Marx’s Civil War in France wrote ‘And people think they have taken quite an extraordinary bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap.’

‘From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine . . .’  The bourgeois republic was not therefore the mechanism to advance towards communism.

Marx noted of the Paris Commune that ‘the political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery.’

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Understanding ‘Citizen Marx’ 2 of 3

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In one review of Citizen Marx, Mike Macnair states that ‘the conception of the democratic republic as the necessary first step to communism was, in fact, Marx’s conception: comrade Leipold has, I think, shown this beyond rebuttal.’  If this is taken to mean that the struggle always and everywhere involves firstly a fight for a bourgeois republic then we see that this is not the case. In the Paris Commune the struggle went immediately beyond it and Leipold argues that Marx never looked at the struggle for bourgeois democracy – a bourgeois republic – in the same way after it (see the previous post).

It is not true today because in many countries, capitalism is ruled by states with a democratic and republican form.  There are all sorts of restrictions and qualifications to this bourgeois democracy, and Marx noted and opposed them in his day, but this did not transform the working class struggle – and communists bringing ‘to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question’ – into a struggle first for a bourgeois ‘democratic republic’.  This is simply old-fashioned Stalinism in which the working class struggle is always limited to a fight for bourgeois democracy, and only when successful, then a struggle for socialism.  This never comes because the bourgeois allies asserted as necessary in the first struggle betray not only the struggle of the working class for socialism but also any struggle for democracy that involves the working class as an independent force.

Macnair appears to accept grounds for rejecting this approach today, on the basis that ‘It is nonetheless arguable that the more advanced stage of the spread of capitalism across the whole globe, and its decline at its core, means that we should focus more on socialisation: the immediate need to move beyond markets and privately-owned concentrations of capital as the means of coordinating human productive activities. . .  . In this sense socialisation is more immediately posed than it was in the later 19th century.’

This means that the working class is the majority of society, with the existence of a much more developed capitalist system that brings to the fore the question of working class dissolution of capitalist private property through socialisation of the productive forces.  To defend this process requires a Commune type state and not a bourgeois republic that will, no matter how democratic or republican, stand upon and defend capitalist property relations.

Unfortunately, Macnair rejects this – ‘There are two problems with this line of argument’ he claims. ‘The first is the Soviet case’ in which economic planning failed.  He argues that ‘Democratic republicanism is essential to effective economic planning; and, because it is essential to effective economic planning, it is also essential to believable socialism/communism.’

In fact, the Soviet Union was not an example of an ‘advanced stage’ capitalism and the initial major problem with socialisation of production was the small size of the forces of production that could most easily be socialised, and thus the associated weakness of the working class that would carry it out. This experience is not therefore an argument against working class socialisation of the forces of production and a state form of the Commune type adequate to defend this process.

The second problem he identifies with a ‘focus more on socialisation: the immediate need to move beyond markets and privately-owned concentrations of capital’ is not so much a structural feature of the current stage of capitalism (that it rules out socialisation) but an obstacle to it.  What he poses is an obstacle to any and all independent political action by the working class, including reform of the capitalist state that Macnair poses as the ‘necessary first step to communism.’

He writes that it is ‘illusory to imagine that it is possible to fight for “workers’ democracy” against the bureaucracy, without simultaneously proposing a constitutional alternative to the regime of the capitalist state as such. Without challenging the capitalist constitutional order, it is impossible to render transparent the dictatorship of the labour bureaucracy in workers’ organisations.’  The capitalist state must be democratised before the working class movement can also be so transformed appears to be the argument.

Democratising the capitalist state requires a force to do it, which presumably is the working class, but as long as the workers’ movement is strangled by bureaucracy this is not going to be done.  In terms of voting, elections in most minimally democratic bourgeois republics involve a bigger turnout than elections within trade unions, which illustrates the necessity to politicise the working class movement.  The prior task to making changes to the capitalist state is to dissolve illusions in it, including that it can be ‘really’ democratic and that it can be made a (more?) neutral mechanism that can be employed by the working class for its own ends.

Any mass mobilisation of the working class will face the immediate task of sidelining or removing the labour bureaucracy because the organisations and mobilisations this bureaucracy stifles are the workers own.  This task will need to be both independent of any change to the ‘constitutional order of the capitalist state’ and go beyond it.  Constitutional forms can change but the essential nature of the state remains.  Prioritising changing this is to invest in the capitalist state the power of making changes that only the self-emancipation of the working class can accomplish.  Why would a capitalist state, again no matter how democratic or republican, help ‘render transparent the dictatorship of the labour bureaucracy in workers’ organisations?’

Removing or otherwise destroying the labour bureaucracy will undoubtedly be accompanied with the need to struggle for goals outside the workers’ organisations, but these struggles should not be under the misapprehension that what we need is reform of the capitalist state constitution in order to change the constitution of the workers own organisations.  In so far as we often seek to change the operation of the capitalist state it is often to remove its influence on workers’ organisations.  The functioning of this state is not an example to follow, or an aid to understanding working class interests, but an obstacle to overcome including the many illusions workers have in it.

Attempts to give a place to republican politics within socialism that it should not have ignores the class character of even the most radical republicanism and inevitably drags us back to accommodation with the capitalist state.  This is not a lesson Citizen Marx teaches.

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Understanding ‘Citizen Marx’ 1 of 3

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The book Citizen Marx, which deals with Marx’s engagement with republicanism, has been favourably reviewed in a number of socialist publications.  In previous posts we have shown that this was an engagement coloured by competition for the allegiance of a radicalising working class.  This involved starting from a materialist analysis of the conditions facing workers and other classes, which brought to the fore the property question and involved a clear separation of socialist politics from even the most radical republicanism.

The book notes both Marx and Engels very brief alignment with anti-political communism that eschewed political struggles because of their claimed irrelevance to the over-riding social question, which resolved into the question of property.  For Marx and Engels this involved the socialisation of production by the working class that would lead to the abolition of all classes, including itself.

This required the conquering of political power by the working class and the book deals with Marx and Engels treatment of the Paris Commune as the first example of the capture of such power (with some qualifications).  Many of their tributes to it and the force of its example included elements of the democratic functioning of the Commune that were championed by republicanism, for example the direct election of workers’ delegates to state office and their being subject to recall.

This state however was to be a workers’ state, and qualitatively different to existing capitalist states, whether an absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy or bourgeois republic.  It was to be a state not ‘superimposed upon society’ but ‘one completely subordinate to it.’ (Citizen Marx p 392)

‘It was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour.’   (Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 22 p334)

The most famous lesson learned was that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold on the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purpose. The political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation.’  (MECW Vol 22 p533)

This is not the bourgeois state democratised, à la radical republicanism, but the destruction of the bourgeois state and creation of one that would serve as a political instrument of working class emancipation.  And as the emancipation of the working class was to be achieved by the working class itself this meant not just creation of a workers’ state but the working class emancipating society from the state – a state not ‘superimposed upon society’ but ‘one completely subordinate to it.’  As Bruno Leipold notes in Citizen Marx, for Marx the Commune was a ’Revolution against the State itself . . . a resumption by the people for the people, of its own social life.’  It was “the people acting for itself by itself.’ (Citizen Marx p 389 & 366)

Leipold states that through the experience of the Commune Marx not only changed his understanding of what a ‘social republic’ was but that this also ‘went hand in hand with a new attitude to the bourgeois republic.  While his Commune writings contain similar condemnations of the emancipatory limits of the bourgeois republic that we find in his 1848 writings, we find no corresponding statements that the bourgeois republic still remains the terrain on which this emancipation is to be fought for.’ (Citizen Marx p 357)

Much of the book covers the period before the Paris Commune and deals with the role of the working class in a purely democratic revolution, i.e. a bourgeois revolution.  Marx and Engels set out the policy of communists, in which the working class, particularly in Germany, must fight for a democratic republic – as an independent force – alongside the bourgeoisie (if and when it does indeed fight) in circumstances where it cannot yet impose its own interests because of undeveloped material conditions.

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‘The People’ before Profit? – Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (part 67)

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The substitution of ‘the people’ for the working class as the subject of struggle is presented In Ireland, in an almost classic case, by the People before Profit organisation, whose reformist politics are based on actions demanded from the Irish capitalist state.  While ‘people’ are to come ‘before profit’, ‘people’ replaces the working class, while coming before profit still leaves profit in place.  And anyway, aren’t capitalists people as well? 

This precept fails to bring to the fore the ‘property question’, demanded by Marx in the Communist Manifesto, whereby the profit of capital arising from exploitation of the working class is not de-prioritised but abolished!

It might be argued ‘what’s in a name’, were it not for the fact that the name was deliberated on and selected precisely in order to avoid clearer identification with the working class and socialism. Presumably because reference to ‘the people’ is more readily acceptable; postponing the task of raising awareness of the paramount role of class and denying the centrality previously accorded to it by anyone calling themselves Marxist. In asserting the priority of the people, and so rejecting the primacy of class, the organisation is setting an example to be followed, not one to be excused or ignored.

Failure to root socialist politics in the material reality of the working class leaves it rootless and prey to the material reality of other forces – we have already pointed to the role of the state in the political alternative offered by People before Profit – but the ideologies encompassing this are many.  Nationalism and racism require denial of the separate political interests of the working class – socialism is international while racism denies working class unity.  It is precisely class interest that is the alternative to these reactionary programmes, not acceptance of the prior interests of an undifferentiated people.

It is possible to fill this missing foundation with moral claims to ‘humanity’ which bases internationalism on ‘human rights’; the ‘self-determination of (capitalist) states’, or protection of minorities based simply on their being a minority.  Similarly, it is possible to oppose racism based on human rights, ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’ and opposition to ‘hate’, but these are even more vague and useless than the concept of ‘the people’.  Their employment by many on the left, tellingly often paraded under the banner of a ‘social justice’ movement, is testament to a collapse into liberal (i.e. bourgeois) politics compared to which the 19th century republicanism we have been examining in the previous posts looks positively revolutionary.

If class is not primary and immediately necessary in order to take forward a movement and programme what is opened up is the intrusion of a wide variety of identity politics that makes nationality, race, or sex etc. the primary means of securing freedom from oppression. This in turn can lead to ‘intersectional’ coalitions that further divide while pretending to unify.

It leads to rejection of the view that the working class is the only social force able to create a new society and which alone can unite the oppressed through the abolition of class. It thereby simply becomes one segment of society with no reason to prioritise its role more than any other.  Petty bourgeois ideas of individual subjective identity flourish where the nebulous abstraction of ‘people’ becomes the source of power to change the world.  With this view of politics the numerous instantiations of the people come to substitute for the working class, which in turn leads to the search for a mechanism for them to do so, and which is invariably found to be the state.

In 1849 Marx criticised the naive belief in a single “will of the entire people” rather than that of a singular ruling class (or grouping of classes) that might represent its own interest as that of society as a whole, or at least of its large majority:

‘For the National-Zeitung there exists one will of the entire people, which is not the sum of contradictory wills but a united and fixed will. How is that?

That is—the will of the majority.

And what is the will of the majority?

It is the will which emerges out of the interests, life situation, and conditions of existence of the majority.

In order to have one and the same will, the members of the majority must therefore have the same interests, the same life situation, the same conditions of existence, or must be temporarily linked together in their interests, their life situation, their conditions of existence.

In plain words: the will of the people, the will of the majority, is not the will of separate estates and classes but of one single class, and of those classes and fragments of classes that are socially—i.e., industrially and commercially—subordinated to this ruling class.

“What should we say to that?” Is the will of the entire people the will of the ruling class?’

(Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 8 p272, Articles from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung)

Marx, in The Civil War in France, noted that the Paris Commune ‘was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris middle class—shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants—the wealthy capitalists alone excepted. The Commune had saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever-recurring cause of dispute among the middle classes themselves—the debtor and creditor accounts.’

It was necessary then (as it is now) for the working class to be the ‘universal’ class and to represent the needs of a society oppressed by the prevailing system: ‘For the first time in history the petty and moyenne middle class  has openly rallied round the workmen’s Revolution, and proclaimed it as the only means of their own salvation and that of France!.’ (Marx, The Civil War in France, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol. 22 p336 & 496)

This was not something that Marx learned only from the Commune but was something strikingly demonstrated by it, particularly the need to win the majority of the population that was then composed of peasants.  How this need is addressed today depends on the particular class composition of society, but this requires that the idea of a unified people is abandoned and the various classes and their interests identified.  In relation to the peasantry, for example, it did not mean strengthening or enlarging their individual property, while a programme based on the demands of ‘the people’ would leave this wide open.

In the writings through which he and Engels formulated their particular politics, The German Ideology, he argued that ‘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 represent 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 represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.’ For the working class, this is realised through the abolition of all classes, including itself.

Marx identified this early in his political development (in 1843) before becoming a ‘Marxist’ and expressed himself in the language of the philosophy of the time: ‘No class of civil society can play this role without arousing a moment of enthusiasm in itself and in the masses, a moment in which it fraternises and merges with society in general, becomes confused with it and is perceived and acknowledged as its general representative, a moment in which its claims and rights are truly the claims and rights of society itself, a moment in which it is truly the social head and the social heart.’ (Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

For this to happen the working class must win others as allies to its programme.  This can only be done if, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, socialists ‘disdain to conceal their views and aims.’  It will not be done by pretending that its views are those of an amorphous ‘people’.  You can only rally others to your flag if it is your flag.

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Forward to part 68

Part 1

‘The People’ vs the Working Class 

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Republicanism and Communism differed on the nature of the revolution that was required and so disagreed on the social force that would accomplish it. For the former it was ‘the people’ and for the latter the ‘proletarians of all countries’, which should ‘unite.’

Republicans accused communists of “ignoring the rest of humanity” while they viewed the people as the non-elite sections of the population, which may or may not have included the capitalist class, depending on the particular republican view.  Karl Heinzen, for example, did not see the new bourgeoisie as the enemy.

Marx argued that “The people . . . was a vague expression” to be replaced “by a definite one, the proletariat . . .”  The attempt to use the former combined various classes with an assumed common interest so that any separation within them was an unwarranted division that set back their common interests.

Even were a “privileged class” identified such a view failed to identify the different interests of the ‘non-privileged’ classes as if they had common class interests, including, for example, the working class, independent artisans, peasants and other petty bourgeois classes.

Only an identification of class and their associated interests could specify their material interests that might unite them or divide them. Such an analysis was inevitable as soon as one identified the particular class interest of the “privileged class”, which might prove to be varied – feudal princes or modern capitalists for example – which would then identify the subordinate class(es) they oppressed and exploited.  Talk of “the people’ obscured the interests of all classes, particularly the subordinate ones, and most importantly for the creation of a new society, concealed or blurred the interests of the working class.

Marx argued that failure to identify the separate interests of the different classes making up “the people” resulted in a false understanding of contemporary political realities.  So, in the elections to the French Constituent National Assembly in 1848 the republicans’ “imaginary people” were replaced by the “real people” the majority of whom voted for the candidates of the anti-republicans and elected the representatives of the bourgeoisie and landowners.

‘Accordingly, when a struggle is impending, they do not need to examine the interests and positions of the different classes. They do not need to weigh their own resources too critically. They have merely to give the signal and the people, with all its inexhaustible resources, will fall upon the oppressors.’  (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 11 p 65)

In the event of defeat ‘then either the fault lies with pernicious sophists, who split the indivisible people into different hostile camps, or the army was too brutalised and blinded to comprehend that the pure aims of democracy are also the best thing for it, or the whole thing has been wrecked by a detail in its execution, or else an unforeseen accident has this time spoilt the game. In any case, the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as immaculate as he was innocent when he went into it, with the newly-won conviction that he is bound to win, not that he himself and his party have to give up the old standpoint, but, on the contrary, that conditions have to ripen to suit him.’ (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 11 p 65-66)

Politics based on the purported interests of ‘the people’ create imaginary interests that are not shared.  Marx gives the example in France of its famous fraternité, which in the 1848 revolution ‘found its true, unadulterated and prosaic expression in civil war, civil war in its most terrible aspect, the war of labour against capital.’ (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 7 p 147)

Marx accused the republican, Karl Heinzen, of invoking the solemn concept of ‘humanity’ to distract from the fact that while individuals may adopt a position that does not accord with their class position, this cannot be true of ‘whole classes which are based on economic conditions independent of their own will.’ (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 330)

The result is to deny the reality of class struggle, which has the result not of abolishing it but of confirming the interest of the bourgeoisie.  In 1850 Marx and Engels wrote that:

‘The struggles of the various classes and factions of the classes against each other, whose progress through their individual stages of development actually constitutes the revolution, are in the view of our evangelists only the unfortunate consequences of the existence of divergent systems, whilst in reality the reverse is true, the existence of various systems is the consequence of the existence of the class struggles. This itself shows that the authors of the manifesto deny the existence of the class struggles. Under the pretext of combating dogmatists, they do away with all specific content, every specific party point of view, and forbid the individual classes to formulate their interests and demands vis-à-vis the other classes.  They expect them to forget their conflicting interests and to become reconciled under the flag of a vagueness as shallow as it is unblushing, which only conceals beneath the apparent reconciliation of all party interests the domination of the interest of one party—the bourgeois party.’  (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 10 p 530)

Concepts such as ‘the people’ are unable to identify the specific interest of classes and are very rarely appropriate terms of analysis.  Their use usually denotes a false unity of interest behind which lies the interests of the capitalist class.  This can also appear credible because the social system, the dominant mode of production, aligns with the interest of the dominant class.  So, the claim to represent or act in the interests of the people is also the primary ideological justification of the capitalist state.

The concept of the people is incapable of exposing the claims of the state to act on behalf of the people because it rejects the separate interest of the working class.  At most it permits the view that the state is imperfectly or unsatisfactorily acting on behalf of the people but that it can be made to act in a way that remedies this.  This is the basis for the view that the state can reform the social system in such a way as to truly implement the interests of ‘the people’ and therefore that the state itself can be made to carry this out by reforming itself.  It is what Marxist call reformism, which denies that a replacement of capitalism and its state is necessary or possible.

Part 66 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism

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Socialism and the inadequacy of republicanism

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A photograph of the Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, London, 1848

Marx supported the struggle for democratic rights because he believed that a bourgeois republic with political freedoms would make the class struggle between capitalists and workers arising from social inequality more transparent, less disguised by monarchical rule.  It would weaken the legitimacy of authority more generally and stimulate working class political development.  Without this freedom the working class would not develop the political capacity to become the ruling class.

Bruno Leipold, in his book Citizen Marx, notes that Marx adopted many of the democratic demands of republican revolutionaries that constituted these political freedoms, ensuring that implementation of democratic rights was not restricted by measures from the bourgeois state specifically designed to nullify them. (Citizen Marx p244). He notes that this enthusiasm led to what proved to be over-optimistic expectations of what would follow as a result.  So, Marx and Engels appeared to endorse the view in 1846 that the introduction of the Peoples Charter would mean that the working class “will become the ruling class of England” (Marx and Engles Collected Works Vo 6 p 58, ‘Address of German Democratic Communists of Brussels to O’Connor, quoted in Citizen Marx p245)

In The Communists and Karl Heinzen Engels stated that ‘the Communists for the time being rather take the field as democrats themselves in all practical party matters. In all civilised countries, democracy has as its necessary consequence the political rule of the proletariat, and the political rule of the proletariat is the first condition for all communist measures.’ (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 299)

Leipold discusses their optimistic expectations of universal (manhood) suffrage in his book (p 245-249) but he also notes Marx’s view of the experience of the French Second Republic, which originated in a democratic revolution but which was usurped by a coup d’état led by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who later declared himself Emperor. This experience had shown that although “bourgeois rule as the outcome of universal suffrage . . . is the meaning of the bourgeois constitution” their democratic commitment crumbles the “moment that the content of this suffrage, of this sovereign will, is no longer bourgeois rule.” On “March 10 universal suffrage declared itself directly against the rule of the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie answered by outlawing universal suffrage.” (Citizen Marx p 246 and 247). Marx was therefore wrong when he claimed that “The classes whose social slavery the constitution is to perpetuate, proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, it puts in possession of political power through universal suffrage.” (Marx The Class Struggles in France, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 10 p79)

In country after country, we can see the fraudulent character of bourgeois democracy.  In the United States measures to suppress voting are routinely employed while the constitution that is so revered contains significant undemocratic institutions and practices.  The political system is dominated by massive amounts of big business money and individual capitalist wealth.  The repression unleashed by Trump and the multiple law and order organs of the state has demonstrated its class nature and renders pretence of its hallowed democracy cynical.  In Europe, triumvirates of Starmer, Macron. Scholtz or Merz participate in a proxy war that no one voted for and are either deeply unpopular and/or elected on historically low votes but endowed nevertheless with full powers.

The defective features of bourgeois democracy are particular to each country but their universal existence in one form or another is due to the capitalist character of society and the social power this entails for the capitalist class and its retinue of helpers.

Marx was later to learn that a different form of state was required to break the power of these forces and embody real democracy.  This was discovered in the Paris Commune of 1871, when the working classes of that city overturned the ruling authorities and imposed their own rule.  Marx noted that:

‘The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.’

‘While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes . . .’

‘It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.’

‘Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery.’

Republicanism promised the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ but only social emancipation can deliver it.

Part 65 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism

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Marx’s critique of moral politics and the politics of morality

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Marx’s criticism of the republican politics of Heinzen was just as cutting as that of Engels, with the title of his writing setting out its nature and the necessary response – Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality. He described it as ‘constantly preaching morality and constantly offending against it’ and again contrasted the approach of communism to that of republicanism:

‘Incidentally, if the bourgeoisie is politically, that is, by its state power, “maintaining injustice in property relations”, it is not creating it. The “injustice in property relations” which is determined by the modern division of labour, the modern form of exchange, competition, concentration, etc., by no means arises from the political rule of the bourgeois class, but vice versa, the political rule of the bourgeois class arises from these modern relations of production which bourgeois economists proclaim to be necessary and eternal laws.’

This type of analysis was not a question of simply understanding the world better but informing to what extent it was possible to change it, thus informing the correct approach to doing so:

‘If therefore the proletariat overthrows the political rule of the bourgeoisie, its victory will only be temporary, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in the year 1794, as long as in the course of history, in its “movement”, the material conditions have not yet been created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and therefore also the definitive overthrow of the political rule of the bourgeoisie.’

Where Heinzen declared that “You are trying to make social questions the central concern of our age, and you fail to see that there is no more important social question than that of monarchy or republic.” Marx said that ‘The question of property, depending on the different levels of development of industry, has always been the vital question for a particular class. In the 17th and 18th centuries, when the point at issue was the abolition of feudal property relations, the question of property was the vital question for the bourgeois class. In the 19th century, when it is a matter of abolishing bourgeois property relations, the question of property is a vital question for the working class . . . It so happens that the “social questions” which have been “dealt with in our own day” increase in importance in proportion as we leave behind us the realm of absolute monarchy.’

Today, the realm of absolute monarchs for the vast majority of countries has passed and the spread of capitalism has created a larger and larger working class that puts the social question to the fore.  If working class revolution is not currently on the agenda in any country it is not because the class struggle between the working class and capitalism does not exist but because the bourgeoisie has had a relatively long period of winning it.  Because the question of absolute monarchy was on the agenda in Marx’s time and capitalism and the working class were undeveloped, Marx had to reckon on how to orient in these circumstances so that the working class could take an independent position and advance its own interests.  The latter is the task today in an analogous situation in so far as the forces seeking to do so are again weak, although for very different reasons.

It is not therefore the case that the 19th century is a foreign land buried in a past epoch but that Marxists today can learn from the original Marx in how to defend and advance working class politics when it is politically weak.  This includes rejection of the claimed alternatives – in their approach to understanding society and identifying the forces that will create a new one – that existed then and are put forward now.  They are not exactly the same, but neither are they wholly different.

So, while Marxists see the property question as primary, the bourgeoisie today turns its back on it when presenting its own ‘solutions’ to the social question. Marx noted that ‘Nowhere . . . does social inequality obtrude itself more harshly than in the eastern states of North America, because nowhere is it less disguised by political inequality.’ He notes that it is here, and in other ‘constitutional or republican representative state[s], that the “question of property” has become the most important “social question”, it is very much the narrow need of the German bourgeois that interjects: the question of the monarchy is the most important “social question of the time”. It is in a very similar way that Dr. List, in the foreword to his Nationalökonomie* expresses his so naïve irritation that pauperism and not protective tariffs should have been “misconstrued” as the most important social question of our time.’

Today the question of tariffs is again to the fore – for the location of the largest capitalist firms across the world; the rivalry of the various capitalist powers through the creation of huge trading blocs, including the question of Brexit; and the pursuit of trade wars by the strongest power in an attempt to prop up its eroding supremacy.  In these circumstances the modern reactionary alternative, that in the mid-19th century was embodied in the petty bourgeois politics of artisan workers and the peasantry, is now embodied in the idea of the resurrection of national sovereignty and equality between nations, which has never existed and never will.

Marx noted that the 19th century version of middle class reform was ‘just a matter of avoiding extremes! What rational political constitution would be compatible with these extremes, these oh so abominable extremes! . . .  take a look at Heinzen’s “federal republic” with “social institutions” and its seven measures for the “humanisation of society”. We find that each citizen is assured a “minimum” of wealth below which he cannot fall, and a maximum of wealth is prescribed which he may not exceed’.

‘Has not Herr Heinzen solved all the difficulties, then, by reiterating in the form of state decrees the pious desire of all good citizens that no person should have too little and none, indeed, too much, and simply by so doing made it reality?  And in the same manner, which is as simple as it is splendid, Herr Heinzen has resolved all economic conflicts. He has regulated property according to the rational principles corresponding to an honest bourgeois equity. And please do not object that the “rational rules” of property are precisely the “economic laws” on whose cold-blooded inevitability all well-meaning “measures” will necessarily founder . . .’

These measures promised by republicans, which Marx ridicules as impossible under capitalism, were prompted to address the oppression of the absolute monarchy and the state then existing:

‘The violently reactionary role played by the rule of the princes only proves that in the pores of the old society a new society has taken shape, which furthermore cannot but feel the political shell—the natural covering of the old society—as an unnatural fetter and blow it sky-high.  The more advanced these new elements of social decomposition, the more reactionary will even the most harmless attempt at conservation by the old political power appear. The reaction of the rule of the princes, instead of proving that it creates the old society, proves rather that its day is over as soon as the material conditions of the old society have become obsolete.’

While it was not possible for the working class to pose its own solution immediately, Marx defended them in independently supporting steps towards the political freedoms that they could employ to further their own cause:

‘The workers know very well that it is not just politically that the bourgeoisie will have to make broader concessions to them than the absolute monarchy, but that in serving the interests of its trade and industry it will create, willy-nilly, the conditions for the uniting of the working class, and the uniting of the workers is the first requirement for their victory.’

‘They can and must accept the bourgeois revolutions a precondition for the workers’ revolution. However, they cannot for a moment regard it as their ultimate goal.’

Today, the ‘violently reactionary role played by the rule of the capiatalist class only proves that in the pores of the old society a new society has taken shape, which furthermore cannot but feel the political shell—the natural covering of the old society—as an unnatural fetter and blow it sky-high.’

These current political forms of capitalism are embodied in the nation state and their regional and world-wide alliances. They are incapable of serving the interest of humanity and are instead the mechanisms by which inter-capitalist rivalry threatens to precipitate a world war from which humanity may not emerge again, except perhaps as a species put back millennia in its civilisation.

The political shell to be broken today is this system of states; ‘its day is over’ and ‘the material conditions of the old society have become obsolete’.  It is not, however, opposition to globalisation and the utopian pursuit of a return of national sovereignty that is the solution.  Workers should reject the reactionary calls of nationalism, the shutting of borders and opposition to immigrant workers. Nor should it swallow the lies that their lives and freedoms are safe with their own ruling class but threatened by that of foreign rulers, so that they must unite with the former in war against the latter. Capitalist war is always draped in the robes of freedom and justice and the war cries today against Russia on behalf of the Ukrainian state are no different that the pleas on behalf of poor little imperialist Belgium during the horrors of the First World War.

Just as 150 years ago, the development of capitalism creates the ‘conditions for the uniting of the working class, and the uniting of the workers is the first requirement for their victory.’  We should not reject the creation of these conditions internationally in order to return to a past nationalism. Socialism is international or it is not socialism and we should not seek to support the division of the world working class but go beyond the unity it has achieved.

Marx’s progress beyond 19th century republicanism was based on the materialist analysis of the development of society at that time, and so it should be today.  His alternative was not moralistic criticism but the working class and its political movement.

Part 64 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism

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Engels and republicanism

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Marx’s materialist understanding of history identified the contradictions of capitalist society, the struggle of classes and the alternative of working class rule.  Republican critics of communism rejected all of this with criticisms that have been repeated ad nauseum since.  The Italian republican Mazzini damned it for reducing man to existing in “the cold, dry, imperfect theory of economists, nothing more than a producing machine,” while the German republican Karl Heinzen stated that “humanity is not always determined by ‘class’ or the size of their wallet”. (Quoted in Citizen Marx p265)

Both Engels and Marx criticised Heinzen, and not just from a theoretical perspective but with a view to the political consequences of his approach, which opposed the materialist analysis that was the foundation of their politics.  Engels accused him of not appreciating where the political struggle was starting from and what should therefore be done:

‘Scarcely had the way back been cut off for him when he declared the necessity of an immediate revolution. Instead of studying conditions in Germany, taking overall stock of them and deducing from this what progress, what development and what steps were necessary and possible, instead of obtaining for himself a clear picture of the complex situation of the individual classes in Germany with regard to each other and to the government and concluding from this what policy was to be followed, instead, in a word, of accommodating himself to the development of Germany, Herr Heinzen quite unceremoniously demands that the development of Germany should accommodate itself to him” (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p292-293)

He criticised his argument about the nature of the revolution that was required, whether a purely political one or also a social one was necessary:

‘He declares the princes to be the chief authors of all poverty and distress. This assertion is not only ridiculous but exceedingly damaging. Herr Heinzen could not flatter the German princes, those impotent and feeble-minded puppets, more than by attributing to them fantastic, preternatural, daemonic omnipotence.  If Herr Heinzen asserts that the princes can do so much evil, he is thereby also conceding them the power to perform as many good works. The conclusion this leads to is not the necessity of a revolution but the pious desire for a virtuous prince, for a good Emperor Joseph . . . the exploitation by the landowners and capitalists is after all surely responsible for nineteen-twentieths of all the misery in Germany!’

The role of the revolutionary party (understood as a general movement) was therefore different:

‘Its task is to reveal the oppression of the proletarians, small peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie, for in Germany these constitute the “people”, by the bureaucracy, the nobility and the bourgeoisie; how not only political but above all social oppression has come about, and by what means it can be eliminated; its task is to show that the conquest of political power by the proletarians, small peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie is the first condition for the application of these means’. (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 pp292-293, 294)

The republican demands of Heinzen, including his social ones, were therefore inadequate, not least because for him they were ‘not a means but an end.’   In fact, as we saw in the previous post, in so far as these arrested economic development – ‘free competition’ – without seeking to go beyond it they were reactionary:

‘All measures, therefore, which start from the basis of private property, and which are nevertheless directed against free competition, are reactionary and tend to restore more primitive stages in the development of property, and for that reason they must finally be defeated once more by competition and result in the restoration of the present situation.’

What made the demands of the communists appropriate was their arising from existing social conditions and their role within a continuing working class struggle (while those of Heinzen represented petty bourgeois politics, of the peasantry, for example).  This included that they necessarily had to be considered in an international context:

‘Herr Heinzen—one of the most ignorant men of this century—may, of course, not know that the property relations of any given era are the necessary result of the mode of production and exchange of that era. Herr Heinzen may not know that one cannot transform large-scale landownership into small-scale without the whole pattern of agriculture being transformed, and that otherwise large-scale landownership will very rapidly re-assert itself.’

‘Herr Heinzen may not know that a country as industrially dependent and subservient as Germany can never presume to undertake on its own account a transformation of its property relations other than one that is in the interests of the bourgeoisie and of free competition.’

‘In short: with the Communists these measures have sense and reason because they are not conceived as arbitrary measures but as consequences which will necessarily and of themselves ensue from the development of industry, agriculture, trade and communications, from the development of the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat which is dependent on these; which will ensue not as definitive measures but as transitory ones, mesures de salut public arising from the transitory struggle between the classes itself.’ 

Engels therefore condemned the republican demands of Heinzen for being arbitrary arising from ‘obtusely bourgeois visions of putting the world to rights; because there is no mention of a connection between these measures and historical development’ (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 296)

Engels quotes communist criticism of Heinzen that they ‘have made fun of his sternly moral demeanour and mocked all those sacred and sublime ideas, virtue, justice, morality, etc., which Herr Heinzen imagines form the basis of all society.’  He criticises politics based on morality instead of recognition that this morality arises from society and that it is the material reality of this from which one must start. (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 301)

We are left with the seeming incongruous republican politics of a call for immediate revolution based on a limited democratic programme that, in so far as it seeks to go further, is out of kilter with the state of German development and what it can likely support.  Engels acknowledges the latter by stating that:

‘. . . the Communists for the time being rather take the field as democrats themselves in all practical party matters. In all civilised countries, democracy has as its necessary consequence the political rule of the proletariat, and the political rule of the proletariat is the first condition for all communist measures.’ (The optimism involved in this is take up in a future post)

Engels goes on: ‘Communism, insofar as it is a theory, is the theoretical expression of the position of the proletariat in this struggle and the theoretical summation of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat.’ (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 10 p 299 and 304)

The reality of working class struggle and revolution in less developed capitalist societies that in themselves are not ripe for socialism, not least because they have a relatively small working class, has thrown up enduring controversy and countless debates.  In relation to them, this early article by Engels retains its relevance through its general approach compared to an earlier revolutionary republican – not socialist – alternative.

Part 63 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism

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Marx and Republicanism

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A recently published book has examined the influence of republicanism on Marx’s politics and explained that it was the main rival to socialism for the allegiance of the developing working class for much of the 19the century.  (Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought, Bruno Leipold) It explains that socialism at this time was largely anti-political, in that it thought political struggle was irrelevant to the emancipation of the working class, and that it was Marx (and Engels) combination of socialism with political conceptions from republican political thought that propelled them to elaborate their politics, including the fight for the political rule of the working class (see Marx’s own statement of what he considered his own contribution to be).

In doing so they superseded both non/anti-political socialism and radical democracy that did not seek the overthrow of bourgeois private property.  Marx condemned those republicans who see “the root of every evil in the fact that their opponent and not themselves is at the helm of the state.  Even radical and revolutionary politicians seek the root of evils not in the nature of the state, but in the particular state form, which they wish to replace with a different state form.”  As Leipold notes, Marx thought that ‘Workers thus needed to move on from seeing themselves as “soldiers of the republic” and become “soldiers of socialism.” (The King of Prussia and Social Reform, Marx quoted in Citizen Marx p161 and 163).

It would therefore be a mistake, in acknowledging the contribution of republican thought to Marx, to give it a centrality to his politics that it doesn’t have, which danger depends of course on what might be claimed for it.

It should be noted that Marx was to develop his ideas on the political power of the working class and the state considerably from 1844 and also that the vast majority of what is called socialism today, including the claims of many ‘Marxists’, wholly propagate what Marx criticises here, often professing to agree with him while doing so.

Leipold argues that Marx moved beyond republicanism after coming to an awareness of the shortcomings of existing republican revolutions in America and France; from meeting prominent socialists and social critics in Paris, including reading the writings of his future friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels; and meeting French and German workers in their various underground communist worker organisations. One result was Marx’s identification of the role of labour in human flourishing, rather than overturning the exclusion of workers from full political participation, which was the centre of republican politics (see the previous posts on alienation).  The emancipation of the working class was not only its alone since “in their emancipation is contained universal emancipation”. (Marx, quoted Citizen Marx p175).

This did not mean the exclusion of the fight for political rights, which Marx and Engels both thought was vital to and for the political development of the working class, but that democracy ‘had become completely inextricable from social issues so that “purely political democracy” was now impossible and in fact “Democracy nowadays is communism”’ as Engels put it in 1845. (Citizen Marx p 172).

This new political commitment led to disputes with republican revolutionary thinkers even before Marx and Engels’ writings on the nature of their communism had been fully published and made known.  Many of the criticisms made by their opponents are still common so the responses to them are still important to a presentation of their politics today.

Their political opponents at this time also consisted of a diverse group that they termed “true socialists”, who substituted moral claims for class struggle, and eschewed the fight for political rights that Marx considered “the terrain for the fight for revolutionary emancipation” even if it was “by no means emancipation itself.”  (Citizen Marx p190).  These rights included trial by jury, equality before the law, the abolition of the corvée system, freedom of the press, freedom of association and true representation.” (Citizen Marx p213).

Through this approach Marx and Engels were able to rebut the criticism of radical republicans that they were effectively on the side of reaction in the political struggle against autocracy.  In turn they denounced republican revolutionaries as petty bourgeois who demanded a ‘social republic’ or ‘democratic republic’ that did not “supersede [the] extremes. Capital and wage-labour” but “weaken their antagonism and transform them into harmony”. (Marx 1851-52, quoted in Citizen Marx p222).

Republican politics was petty bourgeois because it did not reflect the potential collective working class ownership of the forces of production, which required such ownership because of their increased scale and division of labour, but instead sought the widening of individual property ownership. This reflected the still large number of artisan workers whose individual ownership and employment of their own labour was being undermined by expanding workshop and factory production.  For Marx, to seek to go back to craft production was a harkening to a past that could not be resurrected and was thus reactionary.

The grounds for Marx and Engels criticism of revolutionary republicans and non/anti-political socialists was their materialist analysis of existing conditions (which various forces were opposed to) and which included identification of the social force – the working class – that was to overthrow these conditions and inaugurate the new society.  In the previous posts of this series, we have set out how these conditions were to be understood – centring on the developing socialisation of the productive forces – and the necessary role of the working class.  These grounds required the prior development of capitalism and the irreplaceable role of the working class in the further development of the socialisation of production.

The alternative to capitalism developed by Marx was therefore an alternative to capitalism, not to some prior feudal or semi-feudal society; not dependent on some overarching moral ideal or future model of society, and not on the basis of the degree of oppression suffered by different classes or parts of the population under existing conditions.

In the first case there would be no, or only a very small, proletariat as a result of underdeveloped forces of production, which would limit their existing socialisation and therefore preclude collective and cooperative production.  In the second, Marx and Engels were averse to ideal models arising from individual speculation about the future form of society, and were aware that the application of moral criteria to the construction of a new society was subject to the constraints of the existing development of the forces of production and attendant social relations.  In the final case, there were more oppressed classes than the working class, the peasantry for example, which until recently was also much more numerous, and more oppressed layers of society, including women, and working class women in particular.

Their ideas and politics were therefore not crafted to be superficially appealing but to be appealing because they corresponded to reality, one that was to be humanised by a class that itself had to undergo as much change as the society it was called upon to transform.  As Marx and Engels noted in The German Ideology:

‘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; this 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.’

In his book ‘Citizen Marx’ Leipold notes that the implications of this were “a hard pill for workers to swallow.” (p243): 

‘But we say to the workers and the petty bourgeois: it is better to suffer in modern bourgeois society, which by its industry creates the material means for the foundation of a new society that will liberate you all, than to revert to a bygone form of society, which, on the pretext of saving your classes, thrusts the entire nation back into medieval barbarism.’

Part 62 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism.

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