HY 150 BISK
MARXISM
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/hy150biskmarx.htm

The crucial goal of all my courses is to create an environment where you, as the student, can begin to feel comfortable taking responsibility for your own education

McNEILL
THE HUMAN COMMUNITY

CHAPTER 22:
EUROPE 1850 to 1914
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/hy150biskmarx.htm

INTRODUCTION
Political Changes (569)
Sentences Selected from the Communist Manifesto (570)
Unification of Germany and Italy (572)
New International Alignments (575)
Economy and Society (577)
Conservative Social Forces (577)
New Problems of Industrialism (577)
Rise of Socialist Parties (578)
Nonsocialist Initiatives (578)
New Forms of Industrial Organization (580)
British Laissez-Faire (580)
German Planning (580)
Industrialism Elsewhere (581)
Thought and Science (581)
The Systematic Sciences (582)
The Theory of Relativity (582)
Economic Theory (582)
The Soft Sciences (583)
The Theory of Evolution (583)
The Study of Human Society (585)
Irrationalism (585)
Art and Literature (586)
Impact of New Techniques (586)
Painting and Music (587)
Literature and Journalism (587)
Sports and Popular Amusement (588)
Conclusion (588)
Bibliography (590)


KARL MARX (1818-83), MARXISM, AND MODERNIZATION

Beginning in Britain during the eighteenth century, the industrial revolution soon spread to the continent and beyond. Industrialization featured the increased use of machines and inanimate sources of energy, mass production in factories and the mass distribution of goods on an unprecedented scale. Although the early stages of industrialization exacted heavy human costs from many workers, the giant leaps in productivity made it possible to create affluent societies in which most of the population is economically well off. That transformation reversed the usual pattern in human history. In addition, industrialization led to urbanization. As the first to industrialize, Britain became the first urbanized nation, and every other industrialized country has followed suit. The middle classes emerged as the main beneficiaries of industrialization, but during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the workers also became substantially better organized and more effective in asserting their demands. Some governments responded by implementing modern welfare programs.

As middle-class capitalist culture became dominant in western Europe, its economic, technological, and scientific achievements lent credibility to notions of progress and cultural as well as racial superiority. Social Darwinism, the pseudoscientific application of the theory of evolution to social and political issues, reinforced ethnocentrism and racial bigotry. Some of the social Darwinist theories subsequently yielded terrible results. By intensifying aggressive European nationalism and reinvigorating Anti-Semitism, they exerted formative influences on people who eventually precipitated not only cataclysmic warfare but also rationalized genocide. Meanwhile, Karl Marx developed a pseudoscientific variety of socialism that challenged bourgeois capitalism. Although none of the political parties inspired by Marx achieved governing power during this early period, his philosophy had great influence—especially in Germany, where the Social Democrats became the largest party.

WHY MARXISM INFLUENCES PEOPLE
I. MARXISM AS RELIGION
Marxism, many say, is a "secular religion" in that it performs the same psychological and sociological functions as do metaphysical religious beliefs and institutions. That term, strictly speaking, is self-contradictory. "Religion" normally involves a belief in some timeless, non-secular dimension. Yet there are good reasons for using the word to describe the Marxist system. Like a religion it is at once

1. Theory of the World
As a theory it comprehensively comprises doctrines touching every important aspect of individual and social existence. It includes a theory of economics, sociology, politics, and ethics; many have applied it to natural science.

2. Program of Action
As an action program, it has inspired the fanatical loyalty and rigid discipline of patriotism, but unlike patriotism and like religion, it has swept over national boundaries as the creed of a worldwide movement.

3. Answers Basic Questions
Marxism is especially like religion in the basic questions that it tries to answer. It includes—though not under these names:
a. A theory of how evil came into the world and how it will be eliminated.
b. A vision of powers which are beyond man’s control and inflict suffering on him, but which carry him onward to a blessed fulfillment.
c. A prophecy of a final paradise where humanity will live in perfect freedom and happiness.
It is impossible to understand the deep Marxist appeal without considering its powerful effect on emotions that are essentially religious.

4. Moral Dimension
Although Lenin and most other orthodox Marxists would vehemently deny it, Marxism owes a debt to the moral tradition of Western thought, stretching back all the way to Socrates and the Old Testament prophets. For Marx, the philosopher, historian, and economist, was above all else a moral reformer. Though he clothed his critique of capitalism in an elaborate intellectual framework, at heart it was a moral protest against the human misery and degradation resulting from early 19th-century industrialism. And though he assiduously repeated that his socialism was scientific, the new era of human happiness that he imagined in the classless society following the revolution was an ideal as utopian as that of Plato’s Republic.

II. BREADTH OF MARXISM
A. MARX WAS A THINKER ON THE GRAND SCALE
1. Marx was a cosmopolitan, rootless, Jewish émigré intellectual.
2. Marx had moved rapidly from the idealist, hyper-intellectual opposition in semi-feudal Germany, through the socialist sects of Paris, to mid-Victorian England.
3. Marx received a classical education, steeped in a philosophy drawing its inspiration from antiquity and especially from the aristocratic ideal of the Greek polis (city-state).
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"Idealism": any theory affirming the central importance in reality of the mind, the spirit, and ideal. Idealism regards reality as essentially spiritual or embodying mind or reason, and it identifies reality with perceptibility or denies the possibility of knowing anything except the mental life.

The German philosophy was the Idealism of Hegel, which Marx had imbibed while a student at the University of Berlin. Central to this philosophy was the notion of dialectic, the theory that history is a series of struggles between opposing forces, with each successive struggle occurring on a higher level than the one that preceded it. For Hegel, the struggles took place between opposing ideas embodied in distinct national cultures. But Marx shifted the struggles from the ideational plane to the economic or material plane, and transformed the antagonists from nations to classes. In other words, he replaced Hegel’s dialectical idealism with his own dialectical materialism; or, as he put it, he turned the dialectic, which Hegel had stood on its head, back on its feet.

These Parisian writers included Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, and Blanc, whose views on eliminating capitalism and establishing the ideal society greatly influenced Marx—even though later he scornfully brushed their theories aside as "utopian" socialism while claiming that his own were "scientific". "Utopianism", utopian idea or theory, often the body of ideas, views, or aims of a utopian; impracticable and usually impossibly ideal schemes of human perfection or social improvement.

The English political economy consisted of the writings of the classical economists, Smith and Ricardo, whose labor theory of value provided Marx with the basic assumption underlying his greatest work, Capital. But Marx reversed the argument of the classical economists; where they found in the labor theory of value a defense of capitalism, he found a weapon to attack it.
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B. SYSTEM-BUILDING AND MIDDLE CLASS VALUES
This cultural breadth inherited from Germany matched well with the Victorian enthusiasm for system-building and all-embracing theories. Marx was in a good position to watch Victorian capitalism. In 1851, two years after he had arrived in London, the Great Exhibition opened in which, "the world bourgeoisie erects its pantheon in the new Rome where it proudly places on show the deities it has fabricated." And 1867, the year in which Marx published Volume 1 of Capital, marked the height of the liberal era. It was an age of manifold inventions, of swiftly increasing supplies of goods and services, an era in which people daily charted progress. Above all, science was making spectacular advances. Marx fully absorbed the Victorian sense of progress and realism, with its values of freedom, democracy, and rationalism, that were common to all thinkers in that period of exceptional middle-class stability.
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"Capitalism": an economic system in which capital and capitalists play the principal entrepreneurial role. Specifically, it is the system in which private enterprise and control under competitive conditions in modern countries determine the ownership of land and natural wealth, the production, distribution, and exchange of goods, and the operation of the system itself.

"Rationalism": The practice of guiding one’s opinions and actions solely by what people considered to be reasonable. In philosophy, the theory that reason is a source of knowledge in itself superior to and independent of sense perceptions.
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C. RELEVANCE TO OUR OWN TIMES
But to say that Marx was a Victorian is not to say that he has nothing to say to us.
1. Marx’s method of analysis has survived even where its content is no longer of great interest.
2. The broad question with which Marx tried to come to grips—the causes and destiny of economic revolutions—is with us still.
3. Above all, the delicate dialectic between progress and catastrophe haunts the present generation as much as it did Marx’s:

At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. And our invention and progress seems to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.

MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
I. PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION OF 1888 BY FRIEDRICH ENGELS
The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League, a working-men’s association, first exclusively German, later on international, and under the political conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. At a Congress of the League, held in London in November 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare for publication a complete theoretical and practical party program. Drawn up in German, in January 1848, the manuscript was sent to the printer in London a few weeks before the French revolution of February 24th. (. . .)

The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus, belongs to Marx. That proposition is: That in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles form a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class—the proletariat—cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class—the bourgeoisie—without at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.
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Note the following points: economic determinism; stages of history; conflict; because of economic crisis, the bourgeoisie grows increasingly richer and fewer in numbers; the proletarian masses grow more poor and larger in numbers; and with only two existing classes, the proletariat’s victory is the last class revolution.
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II. INTRODUCTION
A Specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals, and German police spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the specter of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following manifesto. . . .
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Prince von Metternich, 1773-1859, chancellor of the Austrian. François Pierre Guizot, 1787-1874, French historian and statesman, prime minister during 1848 Revolution.

French Radicals, radical republicans.
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III. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS
[Definition of a Communist Party] In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only:
1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.
2. In the various stages of development that the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

[Aims of a Communist Party] The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties:
1. formation of the proletariat into a class,
2. overthrow of bourgeois supremacy,
3. conquest of political power by the proletariat.

[Bourgeois Objections to Communism] The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.
They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.

[Abolition of Property] The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.

All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property.

The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labor, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?

But does wage-labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property, which exploits wage-labor and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labor. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is therefore not a personal, it is a social, power. When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.

[Abolition of Wage Labor] Let us now take wage-labor.

The average price of wage-labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence that is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only insofar as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In Communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

[Abolition of Freedom and Individuality] And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communist abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in you existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the nonexistence of any property for the immense majority of society.

In a word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.

[Abolition of Work] It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another express of the tautology: There can no longer be any wage-labor when there is longer any capital.

All objections urged against the Communist mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communist modes of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is for the enormous majority a mere training to act as a machine.

But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of existence of your class.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production—this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.

[Abolition of the Family] Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime, we plead guilty.

But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention of society, direct or indirect, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident, that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

[Abolition of Nationality] The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.

The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself as the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are vanishing gradually from day to day, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

The charges against communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

[Bourgeois Criticisms Concern Only the Superstructure] Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of is material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. Then Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death-battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience, merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.

"Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religion, moral, philosophical and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change."

"There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it acts in contradiction to all past historical experience."

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

[Positive Program of the Communist Party] But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to communism.

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to establish democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.

These measures will of course be different in different countries.

Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of child factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

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 case, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Workingmen of all countries, unite!

THE ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL MANUSCRIPT, 1844 (pub. 1932)
I. INTRODUCTION
A. THE PROLETARIAT
In the EPM Marx claimed that the vehicle of the revolution, the proletariat, would assume the universal role that Hegel had misleadingly assigned to the bureaucracy.  Hegel had said that the bureaucracy mediated between different social groups by acting as a universal class for the interest of all.
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George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831: German philosopher. His system of philosophy, commonly known as Hegelianism, was a philosophy of the Absolute, and the leading system of metaphysics during the second quarter of the 19th century. Hegelian philosophy as expounded in The Phenomenology of Spirit, traced the development of mind, or spirit.  It reintroduced historical movement into philosophy and asserted that the human mind can attain to absolute knowledge.  Hegelian philosophy analyzed the development of human consciousness from:
1. Immediate perception of the here and now to a
2. Stage of self-consciousness from the understanding that allowed humans to analyze the world and order their own actions accordingly, to the
3. Stage of reason itself, understanding of the real, and finally, to the
4. Spirit, by means of religion and art, which attains to absolute knowledge.
The "Young Hegelians" secularized Hegel’s philosophy, progressing from a critique of religion to one of politics and society.
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B. A RADICAL CRITIQUE
The EPM is a radical critique of capitalism is based:
partly on Engels
partly on the anti-industrial ideas of the German Romantics
partly on Feuerbach’s humanism
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Romantic Movement: primarily in literature, for reasserting imagination and sentiment and highlighting individualism in thought and expression as against the restrictive formality of classicism.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, 1804-72: philosopher, pupil of Hegel in Berlin; abandoned Hegelian idealism for a naturalistic materialism. Subsequently attacked orthodox religion and immortality, concluded that God is the outward projection of man’s inward nature.
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II. THREE SECTIONS OF THE EPM
A. CRITIQUE OF THE CLASSICAL ECONOMISTS CULMINATING WITH A SECTION ON ALIENATED LABOR
1. Marx criticized the two most important classical economists, Adam Smith and David Ricardo:
a. Marx said that while they admitted that labor was fundamental to the working of the economy, they acquiesced to assigning it to an increasingly poverty-stricken role.
b. They did not view the economic system as one of many interacting forces, that is, they took the laws of capitalism to be immutable and could not explain the origins of the system which they were describing.
c. They took a one-sided view of man simply as a cog in the economic wheel and did not consider him as a human being.
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Adam Smith, 1723-90: Scottish economist. He worked out theories of division of labor, money, prices, wages, and distribution.  He wrote Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) which laid foundation of science of political economy.  His theories helped set up a system of natural liberty of trade and commerce.  His Wealth of Nations became authoritative in politics as well as economics and exerted an influence throughout the world equaled by few other books.

David Ricardo, 1772-1823: English economist. Founder of the classical school of economics. Attempted a systematic exposition of his theories in Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) developing his theory of rent, profit, and wages, and presenting a clear statement of the quantity theory of money.
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2. The first section culminates in a discussion on alienated labor:
a. the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object, it stands over and above him, and is opposed to him as an independent power;
b. the worker becomes alienated from himself in the very act of production because it is labor which defines man;
c. man’s "species-life," his social essence which relates him to the group, is taken away from him in his work which does d. not represent the harmonious efforts of man as a "species-being" because the object of his labor is ripped away from him, an alien object in any case. Labor defines man, a social beast; therefore labor is social but that labor produces alienated objects; therefore man’s social nature is also alienated;
e. man finds himself alienated from other men, because the group is made of individuals all of whom have had their species-being taken away;
f. in credit, man himself, instead of metal or paper, becomes the mediator of exchange, but not as man, but as the existence of capital and interest, that is, his labor (his essence by definition) which means he, himself.

B. MARX’S SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF ALIENATION
Marx’s solution to the problem of alienation is communism. This means the return of man himself as a social, that is, a human being. Communism is the genuine solution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. There are three aspects to Communism:
1. Communism is an historical phenomenon whose genesis is the entire movement of history. For Marx, the essential problem of capitalism is an economic problem—the abolition of private property.
2. Everything about man is social. Even man’s relationship to nature includes this social dimension.
3. This stress on man’s social aspects only serves to enhance the individuality of man within Communism. This man is an unalienated man, whom Marx described as a "total" or "all-sided" man. The suppression of alienation would mean total liberation. All human faculties would become the means of appropriating reality. This is difficult to imagine for an alienated man because private property blunts men’s sensibilities so that they can imagine an object to be theirs only when they actually possess it. Under capitalism, all physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the single alienation of HAVING.

C. CRITIQUE OF HEGEL’S DIALECTIC
The critique of Hegel’s dialectic as found in his most famous work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, is the third section of the EPM.

MARX AND POLITICS
I. CENTRALITY OF THE STATE
The state is the central institution of capitalist society and thus was a main target in Marx’s political writings. The gap between civil society and the State, Marx viewed as the projection of the alienated essences of man. For Marx the State was an instrument of class domination. Marx traced the origin of the State to the division of labor. The State is opposed to the real interests of all members of society because it constitutes an illusory sense of community that serves as a screen for the real struggles waged by classes against each other.
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There was a widespread tendency in 19^th-century thought [and Ronald Reagan’s, George Bush Sr.’s, and George Bush Jr.’s] to idealize Society and to treat the State as something inherently evil. Civil Society consists of men of goodwill working freely together for the common good; the State was the instrument or symbol of compulsion imposed on them from above.  Examples of Civil Society in action include religious organizations and volunteer groups, private charities, etc.
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II. THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION
Only a revolution can displace the State’s pervasive influence. Marx thought that the most important characteristic of the next revolution—the proletarian revolution—is that it would be social and not merely political: it would not proclaim abstract rights that only a few could enjoy, but would achieve a general emancipation by penetrating to the real life of man—his socio-economic life. In his writing, Marx took a long-term view of the economic causes of revolution and believed that capitalism had a long way to go before it exhausted it capacities to exploit the enormous possibilities created by machinery.

Marx eventually came to believe that workers could hope for substantial gains within the capitalist state. He also came to see that the potential European revolution would be more and more contingent upon the general world situation. Near the end Marx came to believe that Russia might prove to be the starting point of the revolution as his hopes for Britain declined. Marx did not believe in the inevitability of violent revolution. Great Britain, the United States, and Holland, according to Marx, were especially open to peaceful revolution. But he also insisted that the revolution was inevitable and would proceed violently if necessary. Marx never approved of the use of "revolutionary terror," and he said that any revolution, if the socioeconomic circumstances were not appropriate would inevitably lead to a reign of terror during which the revolutionary power would attempt to reorganize society from above. Marx also said that, at least for the long run, a successful revolution would be impossible if confined to one country.

III. COMMUNIST SOCIETY
Concerning what kind of society would be created by the Revolution, Marx was vague. The proletarian revolution would be the first revolution to introduce a non-antagonistic mode of production. There would be no more occasion for the exploitation of the majority by the minority, because the means of production would be in the hands of the working class and the wealth of society would be used for the benefit of society as a whole. In particular, the division of labor, which Marx believed to be at the root of so many social evils, would be abolished. He implied that the problem of the division of labor would be by-passed by the introduction of automated machinery and that a drastic reduction in the length of the working day would also be made possible by automation.

In Capital Marx admitted that however much labor could be humanized under socialism, it nevertheless still would remain within the realm of necessity and thus open to alienation. The resolution of problems such as the exact distribution of the social product, the role of money, and the future of marriage and the family, would ultimately be dependent on the modification of human drives by changing the socio-economic basis of society. The political corollary of the abolition of the division of labor in the communist society was the disappearance of the State.

 

JOURNAL 8 QUESTIONS

After reading the material above and McNeill, The Human Community: Europe, 1850 to 1914, please answer the following questions in your journal.
1. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx users clever rhetorical devices to "prove" wrong bourgeois contentions regarding Communism and the abolition of private property, individuality and freedom, wage labor, the family, work, and nationality. Briefly, what are his arguments—remember, this was a Charles Dickensesque world of economic inequality and brutality that Marx was describing.
2. Why are Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts important? Briefly, what does Marx argue in them?  Based on the EPM, have Communist dictatorships (Russia, China, North Korea) accurately reflected Marx’s vision of Communism?
3. Explain why Marx’s impact on the modern world has been so great.
4. Describe the steps leading to German and Italian unification.
5. Compare and contrast socialist and non-socialist responses to the problems of industrialization.

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