What sort of Economy? What sort of working class? (1 of 5)

Posted on November 2, 2026 by irishmarxism

The following article is one of five which are slightly edited versions of an article published on the Socialist Democracy website in November 2007, almost twenty years ago, just before the dramatic downfall of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ and the worldwide financial crash. It is republished here, with some slight edits, just as the economy of the Irish State is again booming for similar, if not identical, reasons and with some in the financial press anticipating another crash. The debate on the left in Ireland has moved on and some remarks on it will be made in the final part of the series.

* * *

Why is it important to understand what sort of economy exists in Ireland?

There are at least two answers to this. Firstly the nature of the economy determines to a great extent the nature of the working class and plays a very important role in determining how that class thinks of itself. Secondly the character of an economy is an obvious important starting point for any project for a socialist alternative and how that might be constructed. This talk will focus on the first of these questions.

The economy of the Irish State is widely viewed as a success story and is held up as an example for other countries to follow. (1) To answer the question – what sort of economy the Irish one is we can ask why it has been so successful.

One answer widely touted is that the Irish economy experienced a delayed catch-up with the rest of Western Europe. Once policies of national self-sufficiency were abandoned and those of fiscal rectitude plus others were implemented the economy experienced the growth that was always possible. The theoretical perspective informing this is that creating an environment for free market forces allowed them to combine to produce the growth that has occurred over the 1990s and to a lesser extent in this decade. In this sense there was a certain amount of inevitability about such a process once the right policy choices by the Irish State were adopted. (2)

A second part of this explanation is that policies of low taxation, an educated and English speaking workforce, a business friendly environment and a helpful Irish State attracted the foreign direct investment that created the Celtic Tiger phenomenon. There are differences among academics over the relative importance of the various elements but one objection is applicable to both.

The Irish State has pursued a policy of opening up to the world economy since at least the late 1950s. It has also offered tax incentives, a business friendly political and social environment and creation of an educated workforce since the 1960s. Yet only in the 1990s did the economy take off. In fact, in the 1980s the economy of the Irish State was in economic crisis, with most of the factors that supposedly led to success in place. (3) It is not credible to argue that the growth of the 1990s and after was in any sense inevitable.

Explanation

It is quite clear that foreign direct investment by primarily US multinationals was the dynamic motor of the Celtic Tiger boom and is still the key foundation of current growth and success. Decisions to invest in Ireland as opposed to anywhere else are obviously ones that require a global perspective. It is therefore developments at the global level that must provide the starting point for any explanation of the development of the Irish economy.

This does not mean that domestic developments are unimportant, but they are secondary. We have seen that similar policies resulted in different outcomes in the 1980s and 1990s and we can see that the key decisions – by multinationals to invest in Ireland – were taken outside the country.

One other consideration demonstrates this. The open nature of the Irish economy (and others) has led to widespread emigration throughout the existence of the State up until the recent boom. This has historically been determined by incorporation of the country into the British economy as a purely regional economy of the latter. For most of its history the Irish State has effectively had no separate currency. This has meant that it could not have industrialised in the 1960s in the way other less developed European countries did, such as Portugal, Spain and Greece, through production of low-wage consumer goods for export. Wages could never fall low enough to allow this because workers would emigrate to Britain or even to the US before they did. This is why the Irish economy had such a low productive capacity yet had relatively high living standards in world terms. (4&5) It also explains why recent growth could be so powerful and sustained, because untapped domestic reserves of labour (e.g. labour force participation rates) and external reserves of labour (including returning emigrants) could be deployed to keep it going.

To emphasise our point, what this demonstrates is that the Irish economy and its development has always been determined by external powers. The much vaunted escape from the complete dominance of the British economy has been replaced by dominance from a combination of US multinationals and the Western European imperialist project of the European Union.

Bourgeois economists term all this as an example of a regional economy and point out that understood in these terms Irish growth rates have not been exceptional. ‘If Ireland had been a US state its population growth in the 1990s would have ranked it twenty-third of the fifty US states, while no fewer than nine US metropolitan areas with populations of over 1 million grew faster than Greater Dublin.’ (6) The problem with this perspective of course is that the Irish State is a State and not a region and that this introduces elements into the analysis that a purely regional perspective could not allow. For example, competition between the US and EU leaves the Irish State at the sharp end of any conflict and particularly riven by these conflicting forces. (7)

What all this demonstrates is that the internationalist politics of Marxism is vindicated from the start by the need to adopt an international analysis.

International economy

Following the Second World War international capitalism underwent an unprecedented boom accompanied by rising working class living standards. By contrast the Irish State in the 1950s, in the middle of this boom, incurred acute balance of payments crises and massive and rising unemployment and emigration.

This world-wide boom was built upon defeats of the working class by fascism in a number of important countries and by incorporation and subordination in others; by a renewed wave of capital accumulation based on the physical destruction of much of fixed capital in the war, and the reduction in value of much that remained. These factors combined to boost the profitability of capitalism which fuelled rapid accumulation on a new technological basis, including electrification and the car, and upon a new capitalist order based on US hegemony and the growth of world trade and investment. By being inserted into the world market mainly through Britain, which was in relative decline, many of these factors did not apply to the Irish State. By the time it had opened itself up fully to the world market the latter was approaching renewed problems of profitability.

The exhaustion of the technological changes that had initially propelled growth, rising working class demands, and reduced growth in productivity combined to reduce the rate of profit and thereby the rate of capital accumulation and economic growth. This resulted in the economic crises of the late 1960s and 1970s. (8) The latter led to a severe economic crisis in the Irish State with the latter facing bankruptcy through a rising national debt and weakening of the foreign investment that had been attracted in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s significant parts of the indigenous capitalist base was bankrupted by outside competition with no offsetting increase in outside inward investment. (9)

The capitalist class reacted to the worldwide decline in profitability by attacking the working class and taking other steps to reduce costs by shifting production geographically and eliminating the least profitable companies so that overall capitalist profitability could be increased. (10) In this the capitalist class has been successful.

The Stalinist states of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe plus China have been reincorporated into the capitalist system (11), and the working class has incurred defeat after defeat in many countries symbolised most poignantly by the defeat of the yearlong British miners’ strike in 1984 -1985. National liberation struggles were defeated, including in Nicaragua and Palestine, and the cause of socialism has been discredited in the eyes of millions of workers. On the basis of increased levels of exploitation, increased availability of cheapened capital and new markets plus the application of new computer based technology the capitalist class has been able once again to increase profitability.(12) This process has been described as globalisation, witnessing once again renewed growth of a financial sector that disciplines industrial capital and taxes the working class through expansion of debt, assisting the shifting of capital to more profitable locations. Defeat of the Soviet Union in the cold war has also allowed the US to once again seek to confirm a world hegemony upon which the rest of world capitalism may develop. Its wars against Iraq are the most obvious manifestation of this new expansive role.

Notes

(1) Productivity in the Irish State was 29.2% higher than the EU average in 2005, being the second highest among all EU States, with a per capita Gross Domestic Product of 138.9 compared to an EU 25 average of 100 and ahead of the UK which had a figure of 117.5, ‘Measuring Ireland’s Progress 2006’ Central Statistics Office (CSO) p. 18. Of course GDP figures are grossly inflated by the reporting for tax purposes of economic activity in Ireland carried out elsewhere.

(2) See presentation by Patrick Honohan, TCD, 12th June 2007,’Ireland’s economic miracle: A story of delayed catch-up.’

(3) Unemployment reached a high of 17.6% in 1987; inflation reached a high of 20.4% in 1981; economic growth was negative in 1982 and 1983; the current budget deficit reached a high of 8.3% in 1986 and the public sector borrowing requirement reached 20.3% of GNP in 1981. Government debt rose to 129% of GNP in 1987, debt servicing reached 12.5% of GNP in 1985, debt servicing swallowed up 93.5% of income tax receipts in the same year; an average of 14,000 (net) emigrated each year in the first half of the decade and 27,000 each year in the second half – over 200,000 over the decade. ‘The Macroeconomy of Ireland’ Anthony J Leddin and Brendan M Walsh, second edition, pp. 20, 122 & 123.

(4) In European terms for example, in 1960 the EC average was 100 while the Irish State’s was only 60% of this while that of Greece was 39%, Spain’s was 59% and Portugal’s was 38%. ‘The Context of Economic Development’, Kieran A Kennedy in ‘The Development of Industrial Society in Ireland’, edited by J H Goldthorpe and C T Whelan, p. 12.

(5) In 1950 88% of exports went to the UK of which 80% were food and drink, ibid p. 11.

(6) ‘Future Irish Growth: Opportunities. Catalysts, Constraints’, Frank Barry, ESRI Quarterly Economic Commentary, Winter 2005, p. 3.

(7) An additional weakness is that regional models of growth argue that gains from the boom will be concentrated in the growth of asset prices, including property, because property and infrastructure are the only factors of production in ‘quasi-fixed supply.’ This however assumes what needs to be proved – why has their supply remained relatively fixed and why should it? Has the growth in property prices reflected an imbalance between growing demand and less expansive supply and is the former not inflated by speculation? Is not the real reason for this not tied to property rights, class structure and the traditional incentives in Ireland to make money from parasitic activities such as property ownership rather than in directly productive investment, despite the supposed transformation of the Irish economy and society?

(8) Average annual growth in GDP in the world fell from 4% between 1950 and 1973 to 2.9% between 1973 and 1996. The net profit rate for manufacturing between 1950-70 and 1970-93 fell from 24.4% to 14.5% (US), 23.1% to 10.9% (Germany), 40.4% to 20.4% (Japan) and 26.2% to 15.7% (G7).’The Economics of Global Turbulence’, Robert Brenner, p. xxvii & 5.

(9) Permanent full-time manufacturing employment in Irish owned firms fell from 143,300 in 1980 to 110,918 in 1988 while those in foreign owned firms fell from 88,400 to 82,381. ‘The Revival of Irish Indigenous Industry 1987-1997’ Eoin O’Malley,in ESRI Quarterly Economic Commentary, April 1998, p. 37. It should be noted that this led to a number of workplace occupations by workers attempting to defend their jobs, e.g. Clondalkin Paper Mills. This has not happened when multinational companies have folded.

(10) The geographical shift in production can be seen in the increase in foreign direct investment (FDI) over the past 15 or so years. The outward stock of FDI in the world has increased from 1,791,092 million US dollars in 1990 to 10,691,889 million US dollars in 2005. The stock of FDI as a percentage of GDP in the world has increased from 8.5% in 1990 to 22.7% in 2005. The share going to the EU has increased from 37.2% in 1980 to 51.3% in 2005, of which the Irish State has received a disproportionate share. ’World Investment Report 2006’, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, pp. 7 & 303.

(11) That is their productive assets have become capital and their workers subject to capitalist exploitation and the production of surplus value– i.e. both have been employed to earn profit, as opposed to the diktats of a Stalinist plan upon which a bureaucracy enriches itself by more or less naked corruption.

(12) The US rate of profit rose from 16.4% in the first quarter of 1982 to 30.1% in the second quarter of 2007. .’The recovery in profit rates is the strongest in more than fifty years, with 15 successive quarters – until the second quarter of 2007 – of double digit profit growth, pushing profits to their highest levels since the late 1960s.’ ‘The SWP’s Economics’, ‘Permanent Revolution’ number 5, http://www.permanentrevolution.net.

The essential nature of the working class – Marx’s alternative to capitalism (84)

Posted on September 12, 2026 by irishmarxism

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)

Back to part 83

Self-emancipation of the working class

Posted on August 21, 2026 by irishmarxism

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 83

In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels stated that ‘the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.’ (The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p495). They argued that ‘modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.’

‘Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.’

This, however, is only one tendency of capitalist development, albeit the most important, in that capitalism has spread across the globe, ironically, as many who have considered themselves Marxists have argued the decisive importance of the obstacles to the development of capitalism (and therefore of the growth of the working class). This has come in the form of the purported regressive effects of imperialism, set out, for example, in the ideas of dependency theory within which it is supposed to develop underdevelopment. Without this development of capitalism however there could be no talk of the proletariat becoming the ‘independent movement of the immense majority’ or of ‘society . . . more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps . . . Bourgeoisie and Proletariat’.

If this were not the case then Marx’s view, expressed in The Communist Manifesto would not be correct; that ‘the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society . . . Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned . . . ‘

This constant revolutionising of the conditions and relations of production makes and remakes the working class, creating and destroying the material bases of its life, its organisation and its class consciousness. As we noted in the previous post, it does not sweep away all previous ‘venerable prejudices and opinions’, which continue to weigh on the consciousness of the working class and oppressed, but develops new ones that are newly ‘venerable’ and sacred but equally inimical to the development of working class consciousness. Politicised religion still plays an important role in many countries, including, for example, Christian fundamentalism in the US and Islamic fundamentalism in the Muslim world. New theories of identity have been developed whose effect is to erase the importance of class and class struggle and divide the working class, often proposing impossible claims; for example that humans can change sex.

Marx and Engels grew up and matured when the process of worldwide capitalist development was beginning to create an industrial working class in only a few countries in the world and when this class was relatively small in some of them. They never, however, broke from the central principle that the emancipation of the working class was to be achieved by the working class itself, even when its lack of development required alliances with other classes and forces in tasks that did not immediately and directly involve their full emancipation. Had Marx based his politics on the worst oppression of the by far biggest class at the time, he would have advanced the politics of the peasantry.

Engels noted that the proletariat, as it ‘evolved itself from these propertyless masses as the nucleus of a new class, as yet quite incapable of independent political action, appeared as an oppressed, suffering estate, to whom, in its incapacity to help itself, help could, at best, be brought in from without or down from above.’ (Anti-Duhring Part 3 Section 1 Historical)

After Marx’s death, and nearing the end of his own, he reviewed their joint experience, concluding that ‘the time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in on it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are fighting for, body and soul.’

‘The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it is just this work that we are now pursuing, and with a success which drives the enemy to despair. (Engels 1895 Preface to The Class Struggles in France)

In this, he restated views that Marx had come to early in his political development in which he rejected the abstract universality of the state as simply the ‘political heaven’ of the atomistic individualism entailed in private property. The state presents its members as ‘equal in their heaven of their political world, but unequal in their earthly existence of society’ (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, Collected Works Vol 3 p79). At this point in 1843 Marx had yet to identify the proletariat as the universal class and the means to end the alienation entailed by bourgeois private property, but he had already rejected the state as the means of doing so, ironic, as I have said so many times, that many of his self-declared disciples today take precisely this view.

His general approach at this time was set out as follows: ‘we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to. The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. (Letters from Deutsch-Französische Jahrbüche, Collected Works Vol 3 p144).

The politics that Marx and Engels developed did not therefore consist of moral claims that are ahistorical and forever categorical, or other timeless principles divorced from existing society; it did not comprise of virtuous panaceas or utopian schemes that should be imposed from outside, but were rather to be developed from the existing struggles and from within the society of which they were expressions. Today, we might also add that it is not based on subjective experience, of the reaction of oppressed groups to their own oppression in, for example, various forms of identity politics, but in an understanding of their position within the relations of production and how their specific oppression is related to them. From this their role in overcoming this oppression as part of a movement to transform these relations can be developed out of their own struggles.

‘All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.’ Politics and struggle which is incapable of presenting such a perspective is incapable of promising emancipation. Still less are those who, whether consciously or in effect, see other workers as the ‘privileged’, with their ‘privilege’ as the font of oppression, and therefore the enemy to be defeated

The first public statement of their general politics in The Communist Manifesto, as Engels much later explained, was therefore based not on a set of ready-made ideas, which instead they developed throughout their lives, but on the current reality and history of existing classes, struggles, and movements:

‘Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the “educated” classes for support.’

‘Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of total social change, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce the Utopian communism of Cabet in France, and of Weitling in Germany.’

’Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, “respectable”; communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that “the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself,” there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it. (Preface to the Fourth German Edition of the Communist Manifesto, 1890 F Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works 27 p59-60)

Back to part 82

Forward to part 84

The grounds for the achievement of universal emancipation

Posted on July 23, 2026 by irishmarxism

Part 81 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism.

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

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

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

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

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

In the Preface to a contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx wrote that ‘The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.’ Engels also wrote that the abolition of classes will also make possible “a really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of them.” (Anti-Duhring)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on July 4, 2026 by irishmarxism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 79 – Universality (1)

Posted on March 23, 2026 by irishmarxism

In one of Marx’s earliest writings, the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in 1843-4, he asks the question: ‘Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?’

‘Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.’

The idea of universality and how it may be constituted is a central feature of Marx’s views, one that is acclaimed, as in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and also implicitly or explicitly rejected by supporters of identity politics, multiculturalism, postmodernism, religious fundamentalism, and nationalism etc.

The defenders of the rights of particular groups by virtue of their identity as being a member of that group are often in turn supported by those who would also proclaim support for human rights that are not based on these grounds. No doubt many would argue their compatibility, but if the particular rights claimed by the former were such as to be merely expressions of human rights, then no particular rights would need to be demanded.

This is not primarily a problem of these particular rights not being wholly consistent with that of more general human rights, but of the reality of humanity being fractured and divided in reality. The generality of human rights cannot recognise this so become an abstract moral claim that is continually eulogised and venerated but cannot be effected without particular claims being executed.

For Marx, it is the interests of the working class–the proletariat–that are compatible with and can bring about general human emancipation. It is for this reason that Marxists do not cloak their politics in the language of human rights, because their enactment requires recognition of the grounds that would permit them and the struggle required to realise them. Marxists are often dismissive of claims made on the grounds of human rights because they are made hypocritically by those who defend the grounds that necessarily impose oppression in the first place. For Marx, the particular claims of the proletariat are universal ones because these include the abolition of itself, of the grounds of its particular oppression through the abolition of all classes.

The grounds for its particular claims must thus form the basis for the emancipation of all of society, and we have written about these extensively already. In The German Ideology Marx writes:

‘This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless”, and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development.’

‘And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones.’

‘Without this, (i) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism.’

Marx argues that these are the grounds for a real universality of freedom that previous ruling classes have proclaimed but could never represent:

‘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. The class making a revolution appears 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; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.’

The character of the universality of the working class as the new ruling class lies in it being the working majority of society and in the nature of the appropriation of society’s powers that it will accomplish, based on the universal development of these powers, including the power of the working class itself:

‘Thus, things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence. This appropriation is first determined by the object to be appropriated, the productive forces, which have been developed to a totality and which only exist within a universal intercourse. From this aspect alone, therefore, this appropriation must have a universal character corresponding to the productive forces and the intercourse.’

We should not pass without noting that when Marx speaks of the working class making a revolution, and of the universal character of this revolution, his interest is not in a uniform collective, one alien to the individual and her or his freedom. For Marx, the abolition of classes is necessary to permit the freedom of the individual that capitalism and its liberal philosophy claims but destroys in reality. After the previous passage he therefore goes on to say:

‘The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves.’

How this is achieved is what constitutes working class politics, and is the realm of Marxism:

‘Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all. 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, without which the revolution cannot be accomplished; and in which, further, the proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.’

The concept of universality therefore has profound ramifications:

‘The individuals who rule in these conditions — leaving aside the fact that their power must assume the form of the state — have to give their will, which is determined by these definite conditions, a universal expression as the will of the state, as law, an expression whose content is always determined by the relations of this class, as the civil and criminal law demonstrates in the clearest possible way. Just as the weight of their bodies does not depend on their idealistic will or on their arbitrary decision, so also the fact that they enforce their own will in the form of law, and at the same time to make it independent of the personal arbitrariness of each individual among them, does not depend on their idealistic will.’

The state is today held up as the organ of the universal interest, as representing the interest of society as a whole. There can be no more dreadful mistake, as not only does the state and the bureaucracy that it entails have its own interests, but these are bound tightly to those of the ruling class. It is a mistake as common as it is egregious, proclaimed repeatedly even by those who claim to be followers of Marx.

As Marx notes: ‘actual private interests, etc., etc., are expressed as universal interests, descend to the level of mere idealising phrases, conscious illusion, deliberate hypocrisy. But the more their falsity is exposed by life, and the less meaning they have to consciousness itself, the more resolutely are they asserted, the more hypocritical, moral and holy becomes the language of this normal society.’ (All quotations from The German Ideology, Marx and Engels)

The one hundred and seventy-five years since Marx penned these words has witnessed hundreds of millions of deaths under the banner of universal interests in the guise of nationalism, the ‘national interest’ and wars for ‘human rights’. At the same time the ideologues of capitalism have damned the explicit call for real universality as idealistic and totalitarian, if not actually impossible. Recovering the idea of universality as argued by Marx is therefore necessary but can only succeed if the politics of its creation through the working class is defended and advanced practically.

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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 78 – the importance of labour to universal emancipation

Posted on March 7, 2026 by irishmarxism

Behind the decisive importance of the development of the productive forces and the potential abolition of classes, which provide the grounds for the end of capitalist exploitation and social oppression, lies the fundamental importance of labour in understanding human society.

In the ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, (Marx, in Early Writings, Penguin, pp. 279–400) Marx stated that ‘The whole of what is called world history is nothing more than the creation of man through human labour’:

‘The first premise of all human existence, and therefore of all history…[is] that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history’. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life.’

This is just as true today, although it would be an obvious mistake to see ‘production’ and the ‘needs’ it addresses purely in terms of the creation of goods and services necessary for bare minimum existence, or even in terms of modern ‘consumer society.’

What is consumed has to be produced:

‘Through estranged labour man not only produces his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to alien and hostile powers; he also produces the relationship in which other men stand to his production and product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts , p 279–400.)

Production thus involves not just the bare existence of humanity but also the form that human society takes, including the relations of production that set out the pattern of exploitation and oppression. Upon this rests the superstructure of society, conditioned by the productive forces and relations:

‘. . . the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ We thus produce not just material (and immaterial) goods and services but also our social, political and ideological institutions, including philosophy, morality and religion etc.

So, when Marx talks about production and needs he is talking about the production of humanity itself, the form that it takes in various societies and the necessary interaction with the rest of nature, of which it is part:

“Labor, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself.” (Marx,, Capital, Volume I p133,). The satisfaction of human needs involves the ‘metabolic exchange with external nature’ (Grundrisse p. 528), which refers also to ‘historic needs … created by production itself, social needs’ (ibid p. 527), which are not just of a ‘physical’ nature (Capital Volume 1, pp 275, 341) but also include ‘intellectual and social requirements’ whose extent and number ‘is conditioned by the general level of civilisation’ (Capital: Volume I MECW Vol 35 p181.).

It is in relation to this general level that individuals consider their own position, which makes inequality so corrosive of a person’s subjective and objective wellbeing: ‘our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature’ (Marx,Wage, Labour and Capital)

A number of consequences follow. The first is that the development of humanity’s productive powers create new needs, and human beings “distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.” “The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need . . . leads to new needs and this production of new needs is the first historical act . . . a certain mode of production . . . is always combined with a mode of cooperation” (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp 42, 49, 50).

This form of cooperation can be understood in several ways. First, the organization of production is a historical process involving learning and tools that have been transmitted from one generation to another. Second, every previous historical form of production has involved some division of labour — division between mental and material labour, a gender division of labour, class divisions, racial and ethnic divisions, and a division which assigns different individuals to different tasks in the specific production process and in society as a whole.

Third, human consciousness, intrinsic to production, is itself social, as human consciousness is only possible through language, and language is inherently social. “Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all” (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p 51).

Finally, human production is fundamentally social because human beings are fundamentally social animals. As Sean Sayers puts it: “We are inherently and essentially social beings. We develop our natures . . . only by participating in society. . . . Sociality is inscribed in our very biology” . (Sayers 1998) What this means is not simply that we like to hang out with one another but that our very sense of individuality and the kind of individuality that we have depends on the form of society in which we live. “The human being,” Marx writes in the Grundrisse, “is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon [political animal], not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can only individuate itself in the midst of society” (Marx, Grundrisse p 84).

The Marxist understanding of humanity is thus that the ‘human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.’ These relations are conditioned by the need to produce socially: ‘In work, as we have seen, we produce not only goods but also social relations, and indeed we produce and transform human nature itself. ‘The whole of what is called world history is nothing more than the creation of man through human labour’ (Marx, Economic and philosophical manuscripts, p 400, 423).

In Engels’ ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’ labour is described as ‘the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.’

This creation is to be understood not just in terms of the need to produce in order to survive or to produce the culture we now currently enjoy, but also in terms of basic biological properties of humans that we take for granted and which developed from our evolution within the wider natural world. This includes the development of cooperation and the necessity for language and the development of the specific configuration of the human brain, as the outcome of prior evolutionary changes in the corporeal configuration of hominids, eventually leading to the Homo Sapiens that includes opposable thumbs, bipedalism, binocular vision, etc. (Fracchia, The Capitalist Labour-Process and the Body in Pain, Historical Materialism 16, 2008: p 39)

This development is not, of course, the domain of Marxist theory, but of the natural biological and evolutionary sciences, but which Marxism has been able to build upon to explain the continuing development of humanity through its social organisation. In terms of this development, Marxism perceives that humanity ‘by acting on the external world and changing it, at the same time change[s] his own nature.’ (Marx, Capital Vol. 1)

The development of the forces of production therefore can compel not only alienating labour but the source of what Marx considered real wealth: ‘when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc…. the full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? (Marx, Grundrisse p488)

Central to this is the reduction of necessary labour time, which we explained in the previous post is: ‘that required to reproduce the working portion of society at its given, historically developed, level of subsistence, its standard of living.’ Its reduction allows in the free time made available:

‘The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.’ (Marx, Grundrisse p 705–6)

While the potential exists for the time involved in surplus labour to be transformed into free time, the character of necessary labour time will also change. The existing character of labour as mostly alienating, in which the social and cooperative nature of it is distorted and disfigured, could be transformed by conscious control of the productive forces to the objective of meeting and further developing human needs and powers.

‘I would have the immediate satisfaction and knowledge that in my labour I had gratified a human need, i.e, that I had objectified human nature and hence had procured an object corresponding to the needs of another human being’ (Marx ‘Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy’,Early Writings, pp. 259–78.)

‘Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. (Marx, Capital, Volume III p959)

The complete socialisation of the productive forces of society by the working class abolishing all classes, including itself, is a means, not of limited freedom from oppression – a purely negative objective – but ‘“the full development of human mastery over the forces of nature . . . the absolute working out of [their] creative potentialities . . . the development of all human powers as an end in itself ” (Marx, Grundrisse p488). Such is the claim of Marxism for the universal character of the working class struggle for emancipation.

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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 76 – the Universal class

Posted on February 11, 2026 by irishmarxism

When most people come to oppose capitalism they do so in recognition of the oppression which they personally suffer or see in others, giving rise to more than sorrow or despair but a visceral reaction against it. The various oppressions perpetuated under capitalism are identified and given names, such as women’s oppression and sexism, racial oppression and racism, the oppression of gay people and homophobia, while the poor are those who suffer from poverty and inequality.

When Marx started to develop his understanding of society and its oppression, and how it had been understood by philosophers before him, he asked the question–in critiquing the German philosopher Hegel’s Philosophy of Right–what was ‘the possibility of a German emancipation?’

He answered: ‘In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it . . . a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.’

While starting from the nature of the working class’s suffering and oppression he quickly argued that this class was the means by which all social suffering and oppression could be dissolved. The ‘radical chains’ oppressing the working class gave rise to interests that encompassed the abolition of all social oppression ‘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, without which the revolution cannot be accomplished; and in which, further, the proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.” (Marx and Engels The German Ideology MECW Vol 5 p 88)

The universal character of the working class is central to Marxism but, as we noted at the beginning, it is often through recognition of different oppressions that opposition to capitalism arises, with the various forms treated as separate and subject to different causes and prominence. This arises partly from starting from the particular suffering incurred and the salience at any particular time. As has been noted before, the oppression of Jewish women in Germany from 1933 to the Holocaust was determined by their being Jews, not women, while the oppression of Palestinians by the state of Israel, claiming to be the state of all Jews, is the result of national oppression.

However, accounts based on theories of ethnic, religious, women’s, or national oppression cannot explain why all of them have occurred and still exist, how they can be ended, and what the alternative was in the 30’s and is now. The answer to these questions rests on a cogent class analysis and alternative to capitalism, including in its imperialist form, and the replacement by a society ruled by the working class.

In the two examples referenced, it is clear that the working class and socialism is an alternative to German imperialism and its Nazi ideology, and to the settler colonial Israeli state, its US imperialist sponsor, and the ideology of Zionism that justifies their actions. This obviously does not mean that a working class–socialist answer is universally accepted but it can readily be acknowledged even by those who do not accept its arguments that socialism provides a relevant analysis and offers an alternative.

This is not the case with many opponents of other forms of oppression, for whom the working class and its interests, expressed in a socialist programme, is undesirable, irrelevant or not a primary concern. There is no claim on their part to be universal in the sense put forward by Marx.

If they do not identify capitalism as the problem, they often damn capitalism in such a way that they argue that the bad bits that engender women’s oppression or racial oppression etc. can be removed, indulging an understanding of capitalism that does not permit its abolition but envisages it continuing, with different nomenclature covering up its continued existence. What is proposed is therefore just a reform of capitalism but with some changed secondary characteristics that allow it be called non-patriarchal, non-racist, anti-colonial, social-democratic, mixed economy, or simply ‘democratic’ but with no fundamental change to the economic and social system, and therefore no fundamental political change either.

Of course, there are always those for whom a more equal and just capitalism is the objective, in which case, for them, the exploitation and oppression of the working class either does not exist, can be sufficiently ameliorated, or is unimportant; a capitalism guaranteeing gender, racial and other social equality is enough. Class oppression would then have no biased outcomes based or sex or race etc.

Others who might have sympathy with the emancipation of the working class may consider that socialism does not directly address the particular oppression which is their primary concern, whether it be women’s oppression or racism, and they therefore prioritise these. Often, this entails the view that the exploitation and oppression of the working class involves economic oppression, which might sit alongside others, but which has no claim to priority, never mind any pretence to universality.

For Marxists, however, none of this subverts the validity of the proletariat as the universal class whose emancipation involves not only its own emancipation but that of other oppressed groups, including all those within its own ranks. This involves assertion of the importance of socialist revolution to working class emancipation, and that its scope cannot be encompassed in some notion of purely economic emancipation but involves the complete reordering of society and all its social relationships, which no other perspective of liberation can promise.

Marxists claim this because, among other reasons, of their understanding of what capitalism entails, which other ‘anti-capitalists’ do not. This is why Marx recognised the revolutionary character of the capitalist mode of production and why simple anti-capitalism is not at all an adequate designation of what an alternative is. He would certainly not have endorsed the slogan “another world is possible” as doing not much more than begging more questions than it answers. As the text of The Communist Manifesto makes clear, not even all socialisms are adequate, and some were positively reactionary, although that too, like the universal character of the working class, is no longer in fashion. Some values, such as pluralism, have been made absolute.

It means that the revolutionising of social relations by working class revolution involves not just economic liberation of the working class but the abolition of all classes including the working class itself. The complete reordering of the economic and social basis of society involves changes to all aspects of it:

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ (Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. 1859 Marx)

The working class revolution and its emancipation therefore does not just upturn economic and socials relations but also the entire superstructure of society including the state and intellectual life generally – the ideas people have of themselves, of others and of society generally. This leads not just to the abolition of classes and therefore exploitation and oppression but also of the state and its oppression and repression.

The work quoted at the start of this post recalled Marx’s critique of Hegel’s idea of the universal interests of society being represented by the state, while he opposed this and saw the state as a separate and alien force that was a mechanism of class oppression that would no longer be required in a classless society. Its non-repressive functions would no longer be the prerogative of bureaucrats in a body standing apart and on top of society but would be absorbed into it and become the activity of everyone directly involved in those functions.

In this he fought against those socialists who also thought that emancipation would come from outside, including the followers of Proudhon and Robert Owen, who believed that co-operative schemes devised by enlightened reformers would be the workers’ salvation, or those like Blanqui and Weitling for whom freedom would come from the revolutionary conspiracy of an enlightened few.

It is therefore ironic that today so much of what passes for Marxism envisages the state as the embodiment of emancipation with a vanguard that will make the revolution, encapsulated in the slogan that ‘it is the duty of the revolutionary to make the revolution.’ Many of those opposing Marxism and its claim that the working class is the universal class also rely on the capitalist state to enact the end of the particular oppression they oppose.

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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 72 – the dictatorship of the proletariat (1)

Posted on January 3, 2026 by irishmarxism

In a previous post I noted Marx’s statement that

‘Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. That the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.’ (Marx letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, Marx Collected Works Vol 39, p62 & 65)

If we quote Lenin on this, he puts it in his typically forthright way:

‘The question of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the fundamental question of the modern working-class movement in all capitalist countries without exception… Whoever has failed to understand that dictatorship is essential to the victory of any revolutionary class has no understanding of the history of revolutions, or else does not want to know anything in this field.’ – Lenin, “A Contribution to the History of the Question of the Dictatorship”.

‘Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie.’

‘Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested’. (Lenin, The State and Revolution.)

It is almost universal that when introducing this question, it is felt necessary to explain what is meant by the word “dictatorship”. The feeling is justified. The history of Stalinist regimes that repudiated the common understanding of (bourgeois) democracy has made these statements appear as early political endorsement of later practice. This explanation of its meaning is ahistorical, and it is necessary to present the very different understanding of the term as it was understood by Marx.

This usually starts by noting that the word ‘dictatorship’ has a long history, going back to the ancient Roman Republic, denoting various specific political ideas that are not the same as the current conception of it – as a form of government in which absolute power is exercised by a dictator, or as signifying absolute, imperious, or overbearing power or control. Like so many other political or philosophical thinkers, terms routinely employed by Marx often have a specific meaning which it is necessary to know to correctly understand his work. In Marx’s case the use of the word dictatorship during his time was not confined to him and was widely understood.

For Marx it denoted not the overthrown or denial of democracy but its achievement, as put forward in The Communist Manifesto, which he generally subscribed to for the rest of his life:

“We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.” In doing so “the working class can not simply lay hold of the ready made state machinery, and wield its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police bureaucracy, and judicature for its own purposes.’

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto)

The dictatorship of the proletariat therefore refers to the period after the working class achieves political power, so that this power becomes that of the majority. At this time Marx set out that the state would lead this process, but he subsequently emphasised the working class itself carrying out this task, initially through the growth of workers cooperatives and then through their forming a national (and international) cooperative economy. This would be distinguished not so much by its planning as by the governance and control by the working class. (See note below)

Subsequent history has demonstrated that without this working class control socialism cannot be built, which is in many ways a truism, since socialism is (loosely) the name for the working class becoming the ruling class. History also confirms Marx’s analysis of the position of the state: ‘the government machine or the state insofar as it forms a special organism separated from society through division of labour.’ (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works Vol 24 p 96)

In creating this ‘dictatorship’, society is radically changed and the previous economic and political power of the capitalist class – through their ownership and control of the means of production defended by the instrument of the state – is replaced by that of cooperative ownership and a state machinery, composed of workers, and controlled by the working class as a whole.

Note: ‘That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionise the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present cooperative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not proteges either of the governments or of the bourgeois’. (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works Vol 24 p 93-4)

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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 71

Posted on December 22, 2025 by irishmarxism

Marx states in ‘The Communist Manifesto’: ‘In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed . . . Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants . . . The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.’

‘The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie . . . At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. 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.’

‘. . . but with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more . . . The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts.’

‘Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle.’

‘This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.’

‘Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.’

‘Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.’

‘The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.’

Marx goes on to set out the tasks of the working class revolution, which involves ‘the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.’ This revolution is not an eschatological thunderstrike out of the blue that suddenly transforms the world but a juncture arising within existing society through the development of its contradictions.

As a conscious process of real people, it cannot be the outcome of impetuous and spontaneous apprehension, but must arise from the considered and passionate commitment of the vast majority of the working class, arising from the history and development of their struggles as a class.

We can note at least three aspects of what Marx said that has obvious relevance to today. The first is ‘the growing competition among the bourgeois’, which now takes place between previously inconceivably large corporations that span the globe that makes this competition an international phenomenon. This both unites the interests of the world working class and divides it according to the strength of the capitalist system and political weakness of the working class.

The second is the the improved means of communication that can help ‘in the ever expanding union of the workers.’ We no longer need to merely read about wars but have daily, if not hourly, video coverage of its barbarity in Gaza and Ukraine. What the working class movement has failed abysmally to do is to create its own international media, which remains in Lilliputian proportions in comparison to that of the bourgeoisie.

Through this media the bourgeoisie is compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. Hence the bias in coverage of the genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine. Unfortunately again, we see the weakness of the working class movement that is happy to wallow in the lies about the imperialist character of the proxy war in Ukraine and line up behind its own ruling class. The very saturation of the media allows those comfortable in this position to have their deception confirmed again and again. A working class media would at least allow a wider source of information and debate, although again, such is the degeneration of much of the current left that petty bourgeois moralism is employed to silence critical voices.

In previous posts, we noted one result of such moralism in the call to hate capitalism more as a spur and guide to action. We argued in response that a revolution conceived out of ‘negativity’ and ‘hate’, even if it is born out of oppression and exploitation, is utterly insufficient. Such a view faces the problem of how such a social revolution could become the long-term goal of the working class and could be achieved by it.

Miéville, for example, can say that ‘capitalism is unbearable and yet, mostly, it’s borne’, resulting from the success of ‘capitalist-realist common sense that it’s impossible, even laughable, to struggle or hope for change.’ In part he puts this down ‘to a deliberate ruling-class propaganda strategy to discourage any belief in any such possibility’, but ‘also, at a base level, because it’s so difficult to think beyond the reality in which one has been created, lives and thinks now . . . conditioned as we are by existing reality, we cannot prefigure or simply ‘imagine’ such radical alterity.’

The result is that ‘it’s beyond our ken – we can only yearn for it, glimpse some sense of betterness out of the corner of the eye.’ (A Spectre Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, p 89)

Such is the idealist view of the possibility of social revolution that cannot ground the future society from the current one but sees the current in purely, or at least mainly, decisively and definitively, in negative terms for which the appropriate emotion is hate. This is why he states that ‘it’s so difficult to think beyond the reality’ when it is precisely this reality, clearly seen – not out of the corner of the eye – that provides the grounds for the social revolution, giving rise to the appropriate emotions of hope and courage derived from passionate belief in the cause, with hatred of oppression as a motivation but not determining the struggle.

This reality, according to Marx, includes the development of the forces of capitalist production and the associated relations of production that include the creation, expansion, development, organisation and growing consciousness of the working class. The prosecution of this class struggle involves the creation of a mass, political working class movement that demonstrates not only its power to increasingly defend the interests of the working class but its potential to lead to the creation of a new society ruled by it.

This alternative is built upon the conditions and circumstances of the real world and not by thinking a prefigured ‘radical alterity’ – some largely imagined future alternative – but by changing this reality through prosecuting the class struggle, ranging from the creation of democratic and militant trade unions, to workers’ cooperatives and their association with each other, to the creation of mass working class parties committed to socialism. The forces recognised by Marx that governed the development of the working class still exist today and are the grounds for the concomitant development of socialist politics.

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