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Marx and Republicanism

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

In doing so they superseded both non/anti-political socialism and radical democracy that did not seek the overthrow of bourgeois private property.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 62 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism.

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Part 1 here

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

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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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Part 1 is here

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

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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

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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:

‘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.’ (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology)

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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Bourgeois democracy – reply to a critical reader

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In the previous post a reader of the blog expressed disagreement with my approach in a comment.

He stated that “I find it hard to fathom how you can heavily criticise bourgeois democracy like you did in a recent post and at the same time advocate for something you call democratic rights.”

The comment doesn’t reference the particular post and makes only general references that are difficult to identify, including reference to the views of Marx as quoted by Paul Cockshott. I agree with the comment by Boffy in response that:

“I am always rather suspicious of people who cite what Marx and/or Engels are supposed to have said about something, without actually giving the quote, and source of it, because I have frequently found that either the claim is false, altogether, or else, the context, and text of what they said completely changes the meaning of what is being claimed. Given what they say in the Communist Manifesto about workers having no country, and the fact that they were themselves refugees from Germany, makes me doubt what is being claimed for them, here.”

I can only add that it is not altogether clear what the comment Boffy responded to is claiming.

In relation to bourgeois democracy – this post being one example – it is one political form of the dictatorship of capital – the exploitation of the working class, which is separated from the means of production and subject to wage slavery, as its labour power becomes a commodity.  I don’t see how you can be a Marxist and not take this view.

Does this mean we cannot demand and fight for democratic rights within capitalism?  Only the most formal of formal logics could lead to such a view and someone who regularly quotes philosophical thinkers should know this.

The fight for democratic rights was recognised by Marx as necessary in order for the working class to develop itself politically so that it could have the freedom to identify its separate interests, organise around them and struggle for the realisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat.  The word ‘dictatorship’ has rather changed its meaning since it was used by Marx and does not refer to lack of freedom but to the economic and social domination of the working class – uniting the working class with the means of production through cooperative and common ownership, the ending over time of the wage relationship and thus ending of exploitation.

The struggle for this freedom includes the struggle for democratic rights which are not “abstract principles . . .like as a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat” but are concrete measures to be imposed on, or accepted by, the state through working class struggle.  One of the points I have made continually is not to base the struggle for these rights on appeals to the state but to be won by the workers themselves, in opposition to the state if necessary.

He asks “Are your democratic rights legal claims that somehow endure without the presence of a State”?

Marxists do not invent a world subsisting without a state; we recognise the real world that exists in which there is one.  It is why Marxism has no need to invent such things as natural law.  Rights are not worth much if they cannot be validated and this very often is done by the state: so often the democratic rights demanded are demanded from the state, to be accepted by or imposed on it, but always with the view that it is the power and activity of the working class that will ultimately protect and defend them, to whatever extent this can be done within capitalism.

Marxists believe that society can only be understood as it really is – and thereby changed –  by recognising that it is structured by classes with their irreconcilable interests. It is the writer of the comment who is guilty of proposing ‘abstract’ ‘principles’ and ‘morals’, which is why he states that he doesn’t understand what I have written.  It is why he says such things as “I can honestly say I don’t know what these things are” and that “I might not agree with humanitarian morality but at least I could say I understood what was going on.”

When he says that he “would be happier if you and others who speak up for and march out for the asylum seekers did so on the basis of some common humanitarian morality” he simply says that he would be happier if I lapsed into the “abstract principles” he denounces as akin to “pulling rabbits out of a hat.”

He provides me with the option of justifying my position by saying that “I can see how you might get around the problem by imputing an interest and not a morality to the working class.”  And this is roughly what I have done, although I would not put it in those terms.  This, however, is an option that he obviously rejects, yet also rejecting a general “humanitarian morality” as an alternative. Where that leaves him is not my problem.

He then states: “let’s us assume that the bulk of the working class misrecognises the interest you impute to them or consciously rejects that interest. Well you are back with your principles again, an undisclosed humanitarian morality. It turns out therefore that lurking behind the objective interest of the working class is an undisclosed humanitarian morality.”

This is a big, big assumption, and the history of the working class demonstrates that significant numbers have identified that they have a separate interest.  This is demonstrated objectively in the alienation of the working class; its distrust of its rulers and opposition to many of its actions – including those rulers support for the current genocide in Palestine. It is demonstrated in its separate organisations, and in its long history across the world of class struggles big and small – from strikes to revolutions.

Naturally the bourgeois media, culture industry and education system ignores or distorts all this, which makes its undeniable existence all the more necessary to recognise and appreciate.  But let us presume that the assumption is correct for the sake of argument.

If it were true that “the working class misrecognises the interest you impute to them or consciously rejects that interest”; i.e. that it never develops class consciousness; then yes, there would be no material interests that could be realised, and any such interest would be abstract, therefore general and “undisclosed.” The point of the blog is to disclose this interest and advance understanding of what it is so that it can be realised in the real world, through informing working class struggles that are going on quite independent of it.

This is where morality ceases to be abstract, is attached to material interests, where ‘what is’ meets ‘what should be’.  To understand this, it is necessary in some way to be part of the struggle to understand and change the world.  The commentator is not part of this, so appears incapable of understanding Marxism. It is this purely contemplative perspective that, it seems, means that he never gets the point.