Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto together in 1848. It’s punchy and readable. It starts “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism”, and finishes “The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win. Workers of the world, unite!”. Other famous lines include “All that is solid melts into air” (the English translator borrowed this from Shakespeare’s The Tempest), signifying that the permanent appearance of capitalism will be dissolved.
They went on to write Das Kapital (1867) which set out a powerful set of ideas which changed the course of history in the 20th century.
“Dialectic Materialism”
Marx felt that the dominant ideas of society, whether they be of politicians, journalists, religions or artists, came from the economic setup. Marx believed in a dialectic between the materialistic forces in society, specifically between the two classes of modern capitalism. The bourgeoisie on the one hand, and the miserable and burgeoning proletariat on the other. This way of interpreting the course of political events is called “dialectic materialism”. According to this theory, capitalism would produce ever bigger booms and busts, and the conflict between the haves and the have-nots would be resolved in class war, resulting in a classless world of socialism. Marx’s ideas inspired the communist revolutions which descended into the regimes of Stalin to Mao, and thus the word “communism” (and even “socialism”) has now been discredited in public discourse. However, we are all Marxists in the sense that many of his ideas changed and now dominate how we see the world. We can summarise some of the key ideas as follows.
1/ History
Economic forces drive human history. In the past, society has moved from a tribal system, to a slave/owner system, to feudalism, to capitalism. And in each set-up the economic base leads to the “superstructure” of our ideas and institutions (legal, political, artistic, religious and traditional attitudes) which are much slower to evolve than the economic forces which determine them. People are not necessarily aware of the ideological pressure on their views because they are subject to “false consciousness”. They are prisoners of the ideology. Workers are exploited, and alienated from what they produce, and embrace “commodity fetishism”.
2/ Prophesy
Marx’s prediction of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” was based on his idea of inevitable forces leading to a classless society without private property.
This prediction of a classless socialist society, and that workers could be ‘generalists’ rather than just specialists in one step of a manufacturing process, did not work out. Instead, we ended up in Russia and China with a police state running a population of slaves, the complete opposite of Marx’s vision. The fact that these attempts in his name to create a socialist society led to the gulag has repudiated, for many people, everything he stood for, and that the positive points of “mature communism” – security, no homelessness, no unemployment, state funded arts – do not make up for the lack of dynamism that capitalism offers. Apologists will argue that this is not what Marx had in mind, so his name should not be associated with these dystopian regimes. That it’s not a question of private or public ownership but of control of the means of production. These communist regimes were still capitalist in essence – or “state capitalist” in that there was still a divide between the minority who controlled the means of production (capitalists in the West, the state in communist regimes), and the vast mass of workers.
3/ Economics
Marx took Ricardo’s idea of the labour theory of value that, with various caveats and conditions, the fundamental underlying value of an object is the labour time expended to produce it. So a cup which takes 2 hours to make should be twice as expensive as a pen which takes 1 hour. In the short-term, supply and demand might blow these prices off course but over time the market value should converge to this value based on the expended labour necessary to produce it.
Marx went on to develop the concept of surplus value that the capitalist extracts, so that the worker works for 10 hours but is exploited and only gets paid for say 8 hours of labour, the capitalist creaming off the difference (otherwise he wouldn’t do it). The capitalist could extract this surplus value in the form of profit, rent or interest. The capital he accumulates, otherwise known as the “means of production”, can therefore be described as “dead labour”. In a steady state, we would be faced with an immediate and interesting problem: the workers clearly can’t afford all the goods they produce, leading to a “crisis of overproduction”. In other words, goods piling up in the shops with the workers unable to buy them. The way out is that the capitalist will invest his profits in more factories and offices, driving progress. The theory goes on to say that capitalists will invest in labour saving equipment, leading in the long run to the “tendency of the rate of profit to decline”. There are factors which can temporarily offset this decline, anything in fact which removes capital from the system – including exporting capital to other countries under imperialism, the destruction of capital by war or by economic depressions, huge spending on the military, but in the end the pressure will eventually reassert itself and ultimately lead to revolution as capitalists stop investing any more. It’s a fascinating theory, but is generally criticised and does not constitute any thread of mainstream economic thinking these days.
Mike Gonzalez and Tony Benn
Among those who call themselves Marxists, some believe Marx’s greatest gift is this power to clearly diagnose society and history in terms of class. Others pick up on Marx’s statement that “philosophers have only interpreted the world… the point, however, is to change it”. Mike Gonzalez, one of the most impressive and articulate spokesmen of the Socialist Workers Party in recent years put this as follows in a radio interview about Marxism today:
“We’ll have to get rid of this idea once and for all that Marxism is some kind of determinism. It is not. It is a dialectical procedure which has two aspects to it. One, it is a way of understanding in the richest possible way – read Marx’s own writings, how rich, complex and detailed, extraordinarily detailed they are, as writings responding to the reality of a world. But it is an understanding set to a purpose, it is an understanding which is part of an activity. And you can never disengage the one from the other and still call it Marxism. Marxism is both theory and practice, both explanation and action…
Marxist ideas are embodied in actions and tested in actions. And ultimately the validity of Marxism is not tested by the elegance or refinement of the theory but by whether it explains the world in a way that enables the vast mass of people to act from below, in the ways – often contradictory and paradoxical ways…, but from below, in the ways that will enable them to transform the world and transform themselves…
All these movements [fundamentalism, nationalism] are paradoxical… But there is a charge in some of those movements, despite the banners they carry, which is a liberating charge. Now if we can demonstrate that liberation doesn’t go through fundamentalism but through socialism, through society based on collection action and collective control and on an international perspective, then you can take the charge of liberation away from the reactionary banners under which they march.”
And in the same interview, Tony Benn with characteristic clarity explained:
“I think Marx has been liberated by the end of communism. I think there’s no question about it, if you look at what is said, that there is a conflict of interest between those who bust their guts creating the wealth and those who own it, and that the people who work worldwide, if they had the strength and got organised could change the world… And I think we live in a period now very like the late 18thcentury – total cynicism about the Crown, the BBC, the House of Commons, the police, the judges. And unless there’s some leadership offered, people will swing to the right. So Marxism has got more to offer. Just as the Reformation probably saved Christianity, and you can’t blame Jesus for the Inquisition and you can’t blame Marx for Joe Stalin. So let’s get it clear: all organisations begin with a flame of faith, and end up with a bureaucracy trying to destroy heretics.”
Whatever our political beliefs are, we should study these arguments and read socialist newspapers in order to expose ourselves to the widest spectrum of ideas as possible when trying to understand the world around us.