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

Posted on June 28, 2025 by irishmarxism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 64 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism

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Part 1

Engels and republicanism

Posted on June 13, 2025 by irishmarxism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 63 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism

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Part 1

Marx and Republicanism

Posted on June 9, 2025 by irishmarxism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 62 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism.

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Part 1 here

Solidarity with the Palestinian people (2 of 3) – Socialist solidarity

Posted on April 6, 2025 by irishmarxism

Belfast City Hall 5 April 2025

A friend sent me an article on the Counterpunch website that looked at Hamas and the October 7 attack that precipitated the current genocide in Gaza, which I will look at it in the next post. It raises issues about solidarity with oppressed groups by socialists and what, if anything, socialists have to say that is different. Having something different to say isn’t in itself a reason to say it, but if socialists think they have a distinctive view of the world and don’t have anything very different to say it implies that their socialism isn’t very important.

Socialism is international or it is nothing. By this we mean that the cause of the working class in other countries is our cause and that socialism cannot exist within a single country. This means that we seek to advance the socialist struggle of the workers in every country and that a victory in another country is a victory for us. This is the material basis of solidarity for socialists.

Of course, in doing so we oppose oppression in every country, but you do not need to be a socialist to do this and we are socialists not just because we oppose oppression but because we believe only socialism – only the actions of the working class – can defeat oppression and establish freedom. And this goes for the struggle in Palestine as well, although often these considerations appear to disappear when socialists discuss it.

Instead, we get statements such as the following – ‘that we must not only oppose oppression but support the oppressed, the right to resist oppression and the resistance itself. We also get formulas that we should not take sides in intra-Palestinian political disputes, which only the Palestinians should engage in and determine.

If we work backwards – what is this last idea but a form of identity politics? That Palestinians are a group apart with ideas and movements separate from the rest of the world’s struggles with nothing to learn from them; nothing to learn from the long history of working class struggle across the planet? If they are so different as to have nothing to learn then they would have nothing to teach us either. Either they are uniquely blessed with a political leadership beyond criticism because it never gets anything wrong, or it gets it wrong but is beyond help. If neither of these are true, is it because we have no right to speak about their struggle or only to do so to voice our support? (Do we take this view about every struggle: of the French working class or German or any other?).

If it is the last argument, this simply leaves us back at the start and fails to argue why socialists have no right to state what we think is good or bad for the struggle; one that we have said is part of our own world-wide struggle and on which we are also at least partly dependent. In short, the international struggle for socialism is something that involves Palestine and therefore involves us.

It might be argued that the struggle in Palestine is not about socialism, but this is no answer since socialists have a position on all struggles against oppression and these very often do not immediately raise the possibility of a socialist victory. Otherwise, in today’s condition of the class struggle, we would silence ourselves across most of the world.

Of course, what we have to say should be within the framework of solidarity with the oppressed and should have something relevant and positive to contribute, but part of our solidarity is that we believe we do have something distinctive to contribute, not least because for us, solidarity is not an act of altruistic humanitarian concern for others but is part of our own fight. The only basis for refusing to engage in debate on the way forward for the Palestinian struggle is the belief that it is separate from us: ‘In our thousands! In our millions! We are all Palestinians!’ becomes not only untrue (we are not suffering genocide!) but is also denied and rejected by the claim that we are not permitted to offer our own views.

This, however, is the most common view of solidarity, which thus becomes a sort of activist charitable exercise fed by the politics of self-determination of nations. The socialist view is the primacy of self-determination of the working class, as an international class that can unite politically and organisationally, which is obviously impossible without debate, argument and disagreement.

Where does this leave us with the formulation that we must not only oppose oppression but support the oppressed, the right to resist oppression and the resistance itself?

First, even oppressed people’s and nations are composed of classes involving class exploitation and oppression. Genocide only partly qualifies this, as those with lots of money will always find a way to use it to their benefit. Class divisions have a bearing not only on whether and how to resist oppression but also on the objectives of resistance. Class struggle doesn’t disappear and socialists above all should recognise this in their solidarity and within the solidarity movement.

So what about the right to resist? Socialists are in favour of the working class and other oppressed groups resisting exploitation and oppression but do so on the basis that capitalism exploits and oppresses, and that class struggle exists as a result. As Marxists we understand that capitalism gives rise to the potential for socialism because of the nature of its development. From this arises the struggle for socialism, not some moral right to resist that is independent of the circumstances and conditions in society. This is important for how we resist, which we will explore in relation to Gaza in the next post.

In general, however, socialists are always to the fore in advocating resistance to exploitation and oppression, with the view that advancing towards the alternative is what matters above all. We therefore support the oppressed by seeking to end their oppression, which ultimately can only be through the working class becoming the ruling class of society.

This leads to the final claim, that those in solidarity with the oppressed must also solidarize with the resistance and with the resistance movement, and this is where the biggest difference arises. Since our view of solidarity is not dictated by any moral assertion there can be no moral claim on us to support resistance movements that are themselves reactionary, and this obviously includes Islamic political movements (as opposed to democratic and socialist movements composed of religious believers).

Solidarity arises from common interests and purposes. What common interests and purposes arise between reactionary movements in conflict with imperialism and socialists? To ask the question is almost to answer it. Both can be opposed to imperialism on the grounds of some common effects of its rule or intervention but reactionary movements that come into conflict with imperialism are not anti-capitalist, never mind socialist, so their opposition is limited and qualified. Ultimately their interests and purposes are opposed to those of socialists and is the reason for separate organisation and politics in the first place.

Since our primary interests and purposes are separate any common activity is also limited and qualified and there can be no unqualified or unconditional support. Common objectives may allow episodic common actions and organisational cooperation to achieve them but there are no grounds for avoiding criticism or separate organisation.

We therefore do not give political support to reactionary movements on the grounds that they embody the resistance of the oppressed, because that resistance is politically reactionary and cannot represent their full and complete interests. Whether these movements are in our own country or another does not fundamentally change this but at most determines the emphasis to be placed on opposition to our own state for whatever role it plays in the oppression.

In practice many socialists acknowledge this while denying it in words and will criticise the Palestinian Authority but not Hamas, for example on the illogical grounds that ‘denunciation of HAMAS is simply a mechanism for supporting genocide.’ Such an overblown statement scarcely warrants a response. See below a better statement by this organisation to the Belfast rally pictured above.

Back to part 1

Forward to part 3

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (61) Alienation and abolition of private property

Posted on March 10, 2025 by irishmarxism

Hudis claims that in those countries where capitalism had been overthrown the statist ‘socialism’ that existed ‘eliminated private property and the ‘free market’ by bringing the process of distribution and circulation under the control of the state. But they did little or nothing to transform production-relations. Concrete labour was still reduced to a monotonous, routinised activity through the dominance of abstract labour. Abstract labour continued to serve as the substance of value.’ (p104)

By this is meant that social labour was fragmented and produced commodities that exchanged with each other based on the abstract labour contained within them, which was determined by the labour time necessary to produce them and not by the conscious decision on the distribution of social labour according to a preconceived conception of need and human development. Almost immediately he states that ‘instead of a surplus of products that cannot be consumed (which characterises traditional capitalism), there is a shortage of products that cannot be produced.’ (p 104).

However, this eventuality demonstrates that these societies, while not abolishing alienation – far from it – had abolished the market to the degree that meant all commodities were not produced according to the socially necessary abstract labour required to produce them and not under capitalist relations of production with a labour market producing a free working class employed by capital, either private or state. Even the creation of healthy worker’s states will not immediately end alienation, by definition the continuation of any state denotes the continuation of classes, however much their antagonism is attenuated.

Further, as Marx explained in Critique of the Gotha Programme: ‘What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. . . .’

‘But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right.’

‘Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.’

‘But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.’

Hudis is correct that it is the active role of labour that creates private property, but when he quotes Marx saying that ‘though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labour, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal’, he leaves out the last sentence, which makes (bourgeois) private property constitutive of this alienated labour. (Marx quoted in Hudis p 61) Unlike ‘the gods’, this private property is real.

Marx says: ‘It is only at the culminating point of the development of private property that this its secret re-emerges, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labour, and on the other it is the means through which labour alienates itself, the realization of this alienation.’ C.W.3, 280;(Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Early Writings, p 392)

“Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self- estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself . . . which takes place within the entire wealth of previous periods of development. (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol..3, p 296; Early Writings p 348).

Elsewhere Hudis quotes Marx that ‘[P]rivate property, for instance, is not a simple relation or even an abstract concept, a principle, but consists in the totality of the bourgeois relations of production…a change in, or even the abolition of, these relations can only follow from a change in these classes and their relationships with each other, and a change in the relationship of classes is a historical change, a product of social activity as a whole’ (p83 -84)

‘Marx grasps the situation as one of labour’s self-alienation in and through private property. Only if labour is grasped as the overriding moment in the alienated labour/private property complex can the conditions of a real transcendence of estrangement be established. Grounded in the alienation of labour, the immanent movement of private property necessarily produces ‘its own grave diggers’ (in the famous phrase of the Communist Manifesto). But in the dialectical opposition of private property and alienated labour the principal aspect of the contradiction then becomes the latter; hence Marx says that the fall of wage-labour and private property – ‘identical’ expressions of estrangement – takes place ‘in the political form of the emancipation of the workers’. Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 3 p280).

Private property in its capitalist form entails the capital-wage labour relationship – the relations of production between capital and working class – from which class struggle arises, which struggle must eventuate in social revolution that makes the working class collective owners of the means of production and whose political emancipation entails overturing the capitalist state and creation of its own.

As Hudis himself notes: ‘Communism does not deprive man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation’.

Hudis continues: ‘In the Manifesto, Marx also writes that ‘the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property’. It may seem that Marx has muted, if not moved away from, his perspective of 1844, in that the abolition of private property here seems to be posed not just as a mediatory stage, but as the ultimate goal. However, this would be too facile a reading. Marx focuses on the need to negate private property because it is the most immediate expression of the power of bourgeois society over the worker. Through the bourgeois property-relation, the workers are forced to sell themselves for a wage to the owners of capital, who appropriate the products of their productive activity. Without the abolition of this property-relation, the economic and political domination of the bourgeoisie remains unchallenged.’ (Hudis p82-3)

The abolition of bourgeois private property means the overthrow of the capital-wage relationship and exploitation, which are the grounds for the abolition of all classes. This objective is therefore not just required because ‘it is the most immediate expression of the power of bourgeois society over the worker’ but because, to put it in its active sense, it is thereby the most immediate expression of the power of the workers to overcome the exploitation and oppression of bourgeois society.

It is why Marx also said in The Communist Manifesto that “The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property . . . In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.’

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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (60) Alienated labour and private property

Posted on March 3, 2025 by irishmarxism

In his book Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, Peter Hudis lays emphasis on the statement by Marx that ‘ it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labour, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion.’

He argues that private property is not the key to the emancipation of the working class but rather alienated – estranged – labour. He quotes Marx: ‘when one speaks of private property, one thinks of dealing with something external to man’ but Hudis goes on to point out that ‘Property is, after all, the product of human activity. Classical-political economy reverses matters, by presenting the predicate – property-relations – as the determining factor while ignoring the alienated nature of the workers’ activity.’ (p62)

For Hudis, this has implications for the centrality of the abolition of private property to those seeking this emancipation: ‘since private property is an objectified product of human activity, the critique of private property does not satisfy the requirement of reducing all emancipation to ‘relationships to man himself’. [quoting Marx] The critique of private property still deals with what is ‘external to man’. Marx’s normative principle of human emancipation – which he reiterates in 1844 as ‘man’s relation to himself only becomes for him objective and actual through his relation to the other man’ – drives him to look deeper than the property-relation. This takes him to his theory of alienated labour.’

As noted in the previous post, he quotes Marx ‘When one speaks of labour, one is directly dealing with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its solution.’ For Hudis, the solution is put this way:

‘It follows from the analysis that, while private property must be abolished – since it separates workers from the conditions of production – that alone does not get to the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem is abolishing capital itself, by ending the estrangement in the very activity of labouring. We have reached the conceptual pivot of what Marx sees as the alternative to capitalism.’ (p63). He later concludes that ‘In contrast to how Marx was understood by much of twentieth-century ‘Marxism’, our exploration indicates that his real object of critique was not the market or private property, but rather the social relations that underpin them.’ (p92)

Hudis continues: “Two points are worth noting from this. First, wages, like property, are results of human activity. They are made necessary by the existence of alienated labour. To ignore alienated labour while altering wage- and property- relations through the elimination of private capitalists does not undermine the necessity for a ruling class to impose forced labour on the workers. Society as a whole now becomes the ‘abstract capitalist’.” Hudis states this in referring to those socialists who think higher wages are socialist or that the existence of wages in itself is compatible with socialism, since ‘they are paid to the worker on the basis of the capitalist’s ownership of the products of labour.’ (p 64) Specifically, his reference to society becoming ‘the abstract capitalist’ refers to Marx’s view of this as a necessary concept arising from Proudhon when the latter conceives of the equality of wages.

In relation to ‘society’ becoming the ‘abstract capitalist’, Marx is quoted as saying that ‘‘above all we must avoid again postulating “society” as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being.” Hudis says that ‘Marx is not trying to wall humanity into the ‘social’; he rather seeks a mutual compatibility between individual and general interests. Yet exactly how does the present mode of production compel civil society to assume an abstract form? The answer is the social division of labour. By forcing individuals to adhere to a social division of labour, individuals become radically separated from one other. This separation takes on a fixed form, regardless of their actual talents and abilities. Society becomes an abstraction that governs the lives of individuals, instead of the other way around.’ Quoting Marx: ‘As long as man remains in naturally evolved society, that is, as long as the cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, so long, therefore, as activity is not voluntary, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.’ (p 77 – 78)

How is this situation to be overcome? ‘By abolishing the social division of labour’, says Hudis, (p78). He makes the point that Marx ‘sees the process of revolutionary transformation not as a singular act, as the negation of private property and political overthrow of the bourgeoisie, necessary as that is, but as a consistently self-critical social revolution, that is, as a process of permanent revolution. Crude communism – the abolition of private property – is only the first negation. It is a necessary but insufficient step towards liberation. To achieve ‘positive humanism, beginning from itself’ much more is needed – the negation of the negation.’ (p73)

The end of alienated labour entails the end of the social division of labour but the overthrow of capitalism will not immediately end this division or the alienation arising from it. It will not immediately, or even rapidly, align individual interests with those of others or of ‘society’ as a whole: ‘History will lead to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very rough and protracted process.’ (Hudis, quoting Marx emphasis added, p 75). In this statement Marx is not talking about the end of the social division of labour but of abolishing ‘actual private property.’

The overthrow of capitalism and the beginnings of a new society will not instantly realise these aims; alienated labour will not immediately end. Private property relations of production entail alienation but alienation does not immediately disappear with them, so that alienated labour will still exist upon the overthrow of capitalist property relations. Capitalism is not therefore defined by alienated labour but by a particular form social relations that give rise to a specific form of alienated labour; it will still, ‘after the revolution’, be necessary to develop the forces of production, as Marx stated in The Communist Manifesto and still require that much labour remains necessary, understood in Marx’s terms as required to meet the needs of the working population and those dependent on them, while surplus labour, required to develop and meet new higher needs, including more time free of labour, will grow but not yet predominate. While this is the case the division of labour will entail alienation as will the continuing, although reducing, social inequalities.

A certain compulsion of labour remains, albeit more and more voluntary and collective as the forces of production develop to the degree that the time required for necessary labour declines and the choice over the extent of surplus labour increases. Just as the state withers away after the capitalist state is overthrown and a workers’ state created, so does estranged, alienated labour also shrink and fade. The continuation of a (worker’s) state and the continuation of alienated labour does not indicate the continued existence of capitalism, whether called ‘state capitalism’ or not, but the continuation of ‘a very rough and protracted process’, as Marx outlined.

Hudis quotes Marx saying that ‘man’s relation to himself only becomes for him objective and actual through his relation to the other man’ but it is through the relations of production that are entailed by bourgeois private property, and the society upon which is developed from it, that relations to other men and women and thus to him and herself are formed and within which alienated labour exists. The centrality of these relations of production and bourgeois private property entailed in them is repeatedly advanced by Marx and Engels in their political writings and programme as we shall note in the next post.

This, as we have noted, is also advanced by Hudis, that Marx’s ‘real object of critique was not the market or private property, but rather the social relations that underpin them.’

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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (59) – Alienated labour

Posted on February 28, 2025 by irishmarxism

The early Marx sought to understand the new capitalist society through a study of political economy as expounded by its disciples and critics. In doing so he faced multiple phenomena, seeking ‘to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, greed, the separation of labour, capital and landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc. – the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system.’ (Marx Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1844)

In doing so he considered that ‘Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production.’

Marx goes on to put forward the idea that in ‘our departure from a fact of political economy – the estrangement of the worker and his production . . . We have formulated this fact in conceptual terms as estranged, alienated labour.’

‘If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must give satisfaction and pleasure. . . . Thus, if the product of his labour, his labour objectified, is for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him, then his position towards it is such that someone else is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him. If he treats his own activity as an unfree activity, then he treats it as an activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion, and the yoke of another man.’

‘Through estranged, alienated labour, then, the worker produces the relationship to this labour of a man alien to labour and standing outside it. The relationship of the worker to labour creates the relationship to it of the capitalist (or whatever one chooses to call the master of labour). Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour, of the external relation of the worker to nature and to himself.’

‘Private property thus results by analysis from the concept of alienated labour, i.e., of alienated man, of estranged labour, of estranged life, of estranged man.’

‘True, it is as a result of the movement of private property that we have obtained the concept of alienated labour (of alienated life) in political economy. But on analysis of this concept it becomes clear that though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labour, it is rather its consequence, just as the gods are originally not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion. Later this relationship becomes reciprocal.’

‘Only at the culmination of the development of private property does this, its secret, appear again, namely, that on the one hand it is the product of alienated labour, and that on the other it is the means by which labour alienates itself, the realisation of this alienation.’

The alternative to capitalism for Marx is not simply the abolition of private property but the ending of alienation: of workers from their work (as it is imposed as a necessity in order to live while not under their control as to its nature or purpose); of workers from their product (which includes products they would choose not to make with workplaces and technology that subjects them to control and determines the nature of their work); alienation from each other (they compete for resources, including employment, and are atomised by lack of collective control of the means of providing for their needs); and through all this, alienated from their essential nature as social animals working in cooperation to develop their humanity in all its richness through and with other people, who are regarded not as constraints on their freedom, as in bourgeois theory, but only through whom their freedom can be realised.

‘From the relationship of estranged labour to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation.’

‘We have accepted the estrangement of labour, its alienation, as a fact, and we have analysed this fact. How, we now ask, does man come to alienate, to estrange, his labour? How is this estrangement rooted in the nature of human development? We have already gone a long way to the solution of this problem by transforming the question of the origin of private property into the question of the relation of alienated labour to the course of humanity’s development. For when one speaks of private property, one thinks of dealing with something external to man. When one speaks of labour, one is directly dealing with man himself. This new formulation of the question already contains its solution.’

Marx’s critique of political economy, and the conditions of estranged labour in capitalism, included the concepts of the forces of production and relations of production and the potential to overthrow the capital-wage relationship upon which they were based. Labour power is the main force of production and the relations of production are more and more dominated by the capital-wage relationship. It therefore becomes clear that the social revolution that is necessary is one not just for the working class but by it:

The alienation that thwarts the exercise of human powers and potentialities is the product of these forces and relations, which also provide the potential to free humanity from such alienation and allow the further development of human powers and potentialities. Bourgeois private property and alienated labour condition each other and reflect aspects of the same social relation of wage labour and capital. The overthrow of this form of social labour is not therefore something external to humanity (‘man’) but deals directly with its social relationships and therefore directly to humanity itself, as its nature for Marx is the ensemble of these relationships.

The forces and relations of production in feudal society created classes within which an individual’s identity is fixed and determined in a hierarchy by birth. As Marx puts it: ‘a nobleman always remains a nobleman, a commoner always a commoner’. (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology) Capitalism involves capitalists and workers and while there must always be capitalists and workers within it, the individuals personifying this class relationship are not always necessarily fixed. An individual may not always be a worker if she then employs labour, and a capitalist may be reduced to a member of the working class if she becomes bankrupt.

More importantly, while the peasants of precapitalist society were socially and geographically isolated as virtually self-sufficient economic units, producing almost everything they needed, the working class is part of a cooperative division of labour spanning the world (with the organisation of society corresponding to it) and organised by capitalism in such a way that, while alienated from the very powers it has created, has the potential to appropriate these powers and dispel their alienation.

This is what the abolition of bourgeois private property begins to do, with the creation of a cooperative economy and a workers’ state that defends it, together developing the forces of production and dissolving the exploitation of labour by capital.

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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (58) – Marx’s claim to originality

Posted on January 12, 2025 by irishmarxism

‘The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.’

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

Marx explains ‘how the development of the social productivity of labour presupposes cooperation on a large scale; how the division and combination of labour can only be organized on that basis, and the means of production economized by concentration on a vast scale; how instruments of labour which, by their very nature, can only be used in common, such as systems of machinery, can be called into existence; how gigantic natural forces can be pressed into the service of production; and how the production process can be transformed into a process of the technological application of scientific knowledge.’

The development of the forces and relations of capitalist production through the socialisation of labour, necessarily includes the development of the working class, the decline of petty bourgeois (including peasant) production, and the redundancy of the capitalist class (as set out previously) and are the basis of the contradictions of capitalism that are expressed in class struggle.

This is what Marx claimed, against others, was his distinctive contribution:

‘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)

Through this class struggle the working class is the agency by which the cooperation created by capitalism is made fully conscious, organised and reaches towards completion, through conscious planning of the instruments of production that are of such a scale that they can only be used in common. Through this cooperation production is developed to address the needs of the producers, the working class, in the activity of their production, consumption, and the all-round development of human capacities. The application of scientific knowledge will be carried out by the working class in the interests of the majority and not for the benefit of a narrow class of capitalists.

The redundancy of the capitalist class is consummated, the working class itself is abolished and with it class itself. Since the new society can only realise the interests and wishes of its majority, it is clear that the creation of such a society can only be a conscious process; it cannot as for capitalism, be the outcome of a mainly unconscious process of largely elemental economic developments. It needs a conscious historical agent, conscious of its task and how it might be achieved, collectively and freely in an egalitarian manner. How could a whole class, the vast majority within a capitalist society, do it in any other way?

In the Preface to the 1888 English edition of ‘The Communist Manifesto’, by which time Marx had died, Frederick Engels explained why it was not ‘The 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 a total 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 working class 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.’

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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 57 – towards ‘Aufheben’

Posted on January 6, 2025 by irishmarxism

We see from the previous post that capitalism, as a transitional mode of production to socialism, is a progressive development, recognition of which is one of the hallmarks of Marxism. This, however, is not how Marxism is normally understood by its enemies, by those unfamiliar with it and even by some of its friends and self-styled adherents.

Certainly, some of these will accept that this is true in relation to previous societies, whether understood as feudalism, some form of Asiatic mode of production, or older tribal societies, but, it is argued, this is no longer the case. Capitalism has conquered the world, is now in decline and/or in its ‘death agony’, as declared by Leon Trotsky. Marx lived when only a small number of countries were capitalist in any developed sense and today it is the irrationality and barbarity of capitalism that predominates.

There are a number of problems with such a view but in this post we will mention only three. First, Marx’s view is that capitalist progress is not a serene, tranquil and untroubled process. It is not one of harmony and uniformity but one of antagonism, generated by contradictions that are often expressed in palpable horrors. It was ever thus, and today’s horrors engendered by the system are neither new nor preclude progress in the sense set out in the previous post.

Secondly, capitalism continues – albeit with its waste and degradation of humanity and the planet – to develop the forces of production and therefore the foundations for socialism. This includes massive expansion of the working class, without which capitalism does not exist. The sense of progress set out by Marx therefore continues even as it lays waste to nature and humanity, not least because these forces can be developed in such a way to further the protection of both. The alternative view is that the new society must start from somewhere very far away from being able to address these tasks and can only begin to develop the forces necessary after capitalism is overthrown, which ironically calls into question the current possibility and imperative to do so that is so much a part of this view.

Thirdly, a one-dimensional understanding of modern capitalism as regressive can easily elicit appeals to the past, to older models of society or more primitive capitalist forms, which Marx had to reject in his own day, but that are continually proffered, becoming obstacles to the replacement of capitalism by socialism. These include opposition to the centralisation and concentration of productive forces in the name of ‘anti-monopoly’ capitalism; to the growth and development of these forces on the grounds of planetary limits, or to the internationalisation of capitalism on the grounds of the protection of ‘national sovereignty’, against ‘globalisation’ etc. There are many other examples.

Opposition boils down to opposition to the socialisation of the forces of production, to the progress that capitalism has involved, and upon which future socialism depends. In this view, opposition to capitalism cannot rest on what capitalism has achieved but on its purely negative aspects, such as its exploitation and oppression. We have seen that it is precisely in the expansion of surplus labour, on exploitation as a result of the socialisation of labour, that socialism is possible. It is not capitalist crises, or its inhuman oppression or its tendency to war and destruction that will give rise to socialism but to the contradictions of the system of which these are expressions. Capitalism is essentially still the antagonistic system riven by contradictions analysed by Marx in the middle of the nineteenth century. Were it not, we would not be expounding his alternative as still relevant.

Marx did not in the least minimise the horrors of capitalism but did not reduce his opposition to capitalism to its deleterious effects, as the sole grounds for creation of a new society or the incentive to do so. To maintain a belief in socialism while abandoning his analysis necessarily involves invoking some other grounds, and since this means abandoning the material premiss of the world as it exists, it usually involves invoking principles or ‘values’ – moral claims – that cannot support it.

In 1849 Engels wrote that: “Justice”, “humanity”, “freedom”, “equality”, “fraternity”, “independence”—so far we have found nothing in the pan-Slavist manifesto but these more or less ethical categories, which sound very fine, it is true, but prove absolutely nothing in historical and political questions. “Justice”, “humanity”, “freedom” etc. may demand this or that a thousand times over; but if the thing is impossible, it does not take place and in spite of everything remains an “empty figment of a dream”. (K Marx and F Engels, Democratic Pan-Slavism, Collected Works Vol 8 p 365)

What Marx and Engels demonstrated was that ‘the thing’ – socialism – is possible because it is based on the development of existing society itself and can unfold out of it. This does not make it inevitable in the sense that this unfolding is an unconscious, inescapable process, but that it is precisely a conscious process, derived from a consciousness of what exists and its evolution.

This was expressed very early in Marx’s political development when he wrote that he did not want to ‘dogmatically anticipate’ the new world but wanted ‘to find the new world through criticism of the old one’. The task was to ‘develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles’ and wanted to ‘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’. In a letter in 1843 he wrote that ‘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, according to this being, it will historically be compelled to do’.

This consciousness cannot not stop at the obvious iniquity of capitalism, which Marx didn’t fail to note; the bourgeoisie, he noted, had never ‘effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation’, but that through its ‘development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world . . .‘ (K Marx, The Future results of British rule in India, Collected Works Vol 12 p 221 and 222)

He states in Capital Vol I that ‘within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.’

‘But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock.’

‘It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.’ (Marx, Capital Vol I chapter 25 section 4)

Marx damns the capitalist system for its exploitation and mutilation, for its domination and stultifying effects on the worker and family, and for its gross inequality, but still ‘the social productiveness of labour’ is raised.

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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 56 – the conditions for emancipation

Posted on November 27, 2024 by irishmarxism

_{Containers sit on the tarmac at Felixstowe Port | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images}

At the end of a lecture to workers in Brussels written in 1847, Karl Marx stated that:

‘Before we conclude, let us draw attention to the positive aspect of wage labour . . . I do not need to explain to you in detail how without these production relations neither the means of production—the material means for the emancipation of the proletariat and the foundation of a new society—would have been created, nor would the proletariat itself have taken to the unification and development through which it is really capable of revolutionising the old society and itself.’

(Marx, “Wages”, Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 6, p 436.)

For him, capitalism had already so revolutionised society that it provided the conditions for the creation of a new one and the means to achieve the emancipation of the working class – ‘material conditions . . . that could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone’ (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party. Collected Works, vol. 6, p 514)

Today, one very rarely reads a positive analysis of material conditions for working class emancipation created by capitalism, even though these have massively developed since Marx wrote these words, when they were really only becoming evident in one country and were too undeveloped even then. They provide the most striking proof of the potential for the development of socialism out of present society. In many respects however they are no longer recognised as such and rarely considered; in other respects they are rejected, but we will come to that later.

In Volume I of Capital Marx describes the creation of these conditions:

‘As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form.’

‘That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many.’

‘Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.’ (Marx, Capital Volume I p929)

In earlier posts on Marx’s alternative to capitalism we outlined many of these and how the contradictions within this development, including that between the forces and relations of production, would lead to social revolution. We outlined the increasing socialisation of production through the colossal expansion of capitalism across the world, turning more and more activities into commodities to be sold for profit, through a massive increase in the division of labour – within and between workplaces – that involves the the creation and enabling of new, previously undreamed of, technologies.

This massive ‘development of the forces of production is the historical task and justification of capital. This is just the way in which it unconsciously creates the material requirement of a higher mode of production.’ (Capital Volume 3 p 181)

This is elaborated in the Grundrisse:

‘The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves – and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations, has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species – and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased.’

‘Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself.’ (Marx, Grundrisse p 409-410)

The passages above, which might appear difficult – the first paragraph is comprised of only one sentence! – demonstrates capitalism’s contradictions, with its laying of the foundation for its supersession. So, the drive for capitalism to ever greater exploitation of workers – by their giving up more and more of their time labouring for the capitalist that is not recompensed in wages – is indeed their intensified exploitation. However, this very development of production, beyond what is required to simply maintain the working class at some minimum level of existence, expands productive powers in such a way that greater and higher needs can be satisfied – of course for the benefit of the capitalist class initially and to the utmost extent – but also increasingly for workers by increasing what they can consume; in their whole mode of living, and how they can further their personal interests and development. Above all, this expansion can allow this development by potentially reducing the time necessary for work, permitting time to take part in the running of society while also pursuing other collective and individual interests. The massive increase in the productivity of labour forced by capital in ruthless competition can be turned from a means of capitalist exploitation to working class emancipation.

Capitalist expansion of exploitation is ceaseless because it seeks the accumulation of wealth in the form of money, for which there is no limit, but at the same time must do this in the form of the creation of real objects and services which address genuine needs, even if capitalist society distorts and degrades their development and expression. The potential freedom from want, insecurity, inequality and from the subordination of everyone subject to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation, is the foundation for the belief that the ending of the class system will herald the end of all social domination and oppression.

The capitalist has only a ‘transitory existence implied in the transitory necessity for the capitalist mode of production’ who ‘ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake; he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society, and creates those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.’ (Marx Capital Volume 1 p 739)

Consequently, ‘from the moment that the bourgeois mode of production and the conditions of production and distribution which correspond to it are recognised as historical, the delusion of regarding them as natural laws of production vanishes and the prospect opens up of a new society, [a new] economic formation of society, to which the bourgeois mode of production is only the transition.’ (Marx, Theories of Surplus `value MECW Vo 33 p 346.) Capitalism is therefore just a transitional phase in the evolution of human society and its development of productive powers through which it shapes itself and its environment.

* * *

This post is the continuation of a series, the previous one of which is linked here, and the first of which can be found here.

Back to part 55

Forward to part 57

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Sráid Marx

An Irish Marxist Blog

Tag Archives: Marxism

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

Engels and republicanism

Marx and Republicanism

Solidarity with the Palestinian people (2 of 3) – Socialist solidarity

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (61) Alienation and abolition of private property

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (60) Alienated labour and private property

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (59) – Alienated labour

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (58) – Marx’s claim to originality

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 57 – towards ‘Aufheben’

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 56 – the conditions for emancipation