The Marx Behind the Myths
Colin Barker
| Revision History | ||
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| • September 1993 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 1 (pp. 24,22) | ||
| • September 20, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
Karl Marx was a radical student and journalist in Germany, on the extreme left of the democratic movement.
From the beginning of his career he was in trouble with the authorities for attacking state censorship. From the start he was a committed democrat and remained so for the whole of his life.
In the early 1840s, young Karl Marx became a communist. This did not mean that he abandoned democratic ideals; rather it meant that he deepened them a hundred-fold.
It was not enough, he argued, to fight for “political emancipation,” to win the vote and citizenship rights for all. The real roots of human oppression and alienation lie deeper, in the very way that society itself is organized.
Changing the constitution is useful, but limited: real freedom for humankind can only come, not by replacing Monarchy with Republic, but by overthrowing private property, competition and exploitation.
In a democratic republic, like the US. today, everyone is “equal before the law.” But misery and poverty continue. Slavery is abolished, but only outside the workplace.
Deliberately using the language of politics, Marx insisted that capitalists have “despotic” power over workers at work, and called the workers “wage slaves.”
But the problems of capitalism go deeper. A divided social system across the globe, driven by competition between rival capitalists and rival states, is a system out of all control.
It is subject to immense convulsions and crisis, which alternately promote mad expansions of exploitation and even more lunatic slumps, when workers are cast on the scrap heap.
Workers, Marx explained, are alienated in every sphere of their life. The whole social world rests on the labor of working people, but is out of our control.
The very thing that distinguishes us from the rest of the animal world is our human power to work creatively and gain mastery over production, but capitalism systematically takes this from us. We are a social species, all of us are inextricably dependent on millions of other people; but capitalism sets us against each other, in competition and war.
Humanity needs to take back, collectively and democratically, its own power to shape the world. To do that, it must destroy the power of the ruling class.
Marx was not the first communist. What distinguished his thought from previous communist thinkers was his terrific sense of history, together with an equally powerful sense of “realism” about the struggle for a communist society.
He argued, against a host of utopian critics of capitalism, that it’s no good just wishing for a different world or drawing up hare-brained schemes for social regeneration. Communism only becomes really possible on two conditions.
The first condition is that human productivity should have developed sufficiently to make communism practicable. A poverty-stricken world, where men and women can barely produce enough for their own needs, could not sustain a genuinely democratic society: everyone would be at each other’s throats.
Anyone reading the Communist Manifesto for the first time always gets a surprise: Marx starts by praising the achievements of the bourgeoisie! It was capitalism’s historic achievement, he argued, that now, for the first time in history, the material conditions for communism were created.
Only in the modern world has human mastery of nature developed to the point where everyone can have enough to eat, adequate clothing and housing, and plenty of free time. However, the methods by which the capitalist class developed humanity’s productive forces were barbarous and irrational in the extreme.
Nonetheless, in past history recurrent famines were an inescapable part of human fate; today everyone knows that not a child needs to starve, that not a single sick person needs to lack medical care.
In the past the only solution to basic human misery seemed to be prayer; today, thanks to capitalism’s achievements, we know the problem is political.
The second condition is connected with the first. For communism to be more than a dream, there must be a real social force to bring it into being.
And this too was capitalism’s achievement: as Marx put it, “What the bourgeoisie above all produces are its own gravediggers.” Capitalism developed the modern working class.
Why this emphasis? Workers are unlike previous exploited and oppressed classes in history.
Capitalism itself shoves them together, in cities and workplaces, endowing them with collective power; capitalism forces them to cooperate with each other; capitalism, precisely in order to exploit workers better, must educate them and raise their cultural level—far above, indeed, the level of previous ruling classes.
And capitalism compels workers into a life of permanent struggle, whether they like it or not.
What distinguishes the working class, therefore, from all previous exploited classes is not its misery. Indeed, although workers are more alienated than peasants, they live on an average better and longer lives.
But crucially, the working class has immense power and capacities. It is the first class in history which is capable of overthrowing class society entirely.
And the more that capitalism develops, the bigger and potentially stronger the working class becomes across the globe. In 1848, when Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, the working class was still tiny: it formed a majority of the population only in Britain and perhaps one or two other countries.
Even in England at that time, most workers were still employed in very small workplaces. Today, the working class—those who live by selling their labor power—is for the first time in history a majority of the world’s population.
And the potential power of the working class today is immeasurably greater than in Marx’s own time.
The other side to the coin is that capitalism, as part of its very method of development, is also convulsed by crises.
The difference between Marx’s time and ours is not, as some bourgeois thinkers and even some fake socialists have argued, that capitalism has overcome its tendency to crisis: rather, the crises of the 20th century have been on a larger and more terrible scale. Now, therefore, the stakes in the class struggle are much higher.
When workers’ movements are defeated, the price they pay is on a scale that Marx could not have imagined in his worst nightmares: world wars, fascism, the Gulag and the Holocaust, the threat of nuclear Armageddon.
Marx once wrote that the choice for humanity was between socialism and barbarism: the truth of that observation is more obvious and chilling today.
Marx was not an Ivory Tower intellectual, but was actively involved in the revolutionary movements of his own time.
Expelled from Germany for political activity, he returned to Cologne on the outbreak of revolution in 1848 to edit a radical paper and play a leading part in the popular movement. The defeat of the German revolution saw him exiled once more, this time to England.
In the 1860’s there was again a revival of the workers’ movement, and Marx again immersed himself in it.
In the same years that he was preparing the manuscripts for his great unfinished masterpiece, Das Kapital, Marx also became the secretary of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA).
This was the first real international organization of workers, and brought Marx into direct practical contact with the trade unions and workers’ parties of Europe.
From the beginning, the IWMA united “economic” and “political” questions. Until 1871, its chief practical activities were two: it organized support for the Polish struggle for independence, and engaged in quite effective international strike support work.
It also identified strongly with the struggle against slavery in America, firmly supporting Abraham Lincoln and the North against the southern slave owners’ republic. Marx was at the center of much of this work.
He drafted the IWMA’s rules whose opening words expressed the very heart of his ideas: “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”
The aim of the International was “the abolition of all class rule.” The basis of all servitude, misery, degradation and political dependence across the world, the rules explained, was the workers’ economic subjection to“the monopolizer of the means of labor.”
Every political movement should therefore center on the goal of “the economic emancipation of the working classes.”
That task could not be undertaken on a local or national basis, but required international solidarity between workers in different countries.
In 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War, the working people of Paris briefly and heroically established a new form of organization, the Paris Commune.
After two months, their immensely democratic and popular government was smashed to pieces in a brutal orgy of ruling class violence. Thousands were killed.
In the name of the IWMA, Marx put out a long and noble statement in defense of the Commune. In the principles developed by the Communards, he suggested, there lay the most marvelous advances.
In their practice, the Parisian workers had developed the basic framework required for a real workers’ state. They had abolished the old ruling class state machine, based on bureaucracy and privilege.
In the Commune every office holder had to be elected and subject to recall: not just the “government” but also the judiciary, police, military officers and the rest. All those who held office were paid no more than the ordinary worker.
In place of the professional standing army and police, the armed workers themselves handled all issues of order and military defense.
For Marx, the experience of the Commune showed that the practical creativity of workers in struggle produces results more advanced than any intellectual or leader could achieve.
The Parisian workers had revealed something that even Marx had never fully grasped before: if working people were genuinely to run society, they needed a new and much more democratic form of regime.
And that required sweeping away the old hierarchical state. “The working class,” as he wrote, “cannot simply lay hold of the ready made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”
In one brief sentence Marx drew a line of division between real communists, those who struggle for working class power, and every variant of reformist.
The existing state machinery is designed to keep the great majority out of power; it must be broken, and replaced by a new form of state, which is directly subject to popular election and control.
It would be several years before a new beginning in socialist politics in Europe could be made after the defeat of the Commune.
When that happened, in France and in Germany, it soon became apparent that the new workers’ parties would be dominated by a new problem: reformism. Marx died in 1883, before these tendencies had fully developed. Nonetheless, some of his last writings related to this question.
In a long circular letter to German socialists (1879), he and his comrade Frederick Engels attacked the influence of liberal reformists in the workers’ movement. They concluded:
“When the International was formed, we expressly formulated the battle cry: the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.
“We cannot ally ourselves, therefore, with people who openly declare that the workers are too uneducated to free themselves and must first be liberated from above by philanthropic big bourgeois or petty bourgeois.”
Thus, from the beginning of his life as a communist until his death, the real Karl Marx argued and fought for one thing: that the working people of the world should organize themselves to take every form of power into their hands, directly.
Always and everywhere he opposed those who preached “socialism from above.” For Marx, the working class alone has the capacity to free the new society that lies, waiting to be built, within the present chaotic and divided world of capitalism.
No one need starve in a world where food surpluses are produced every year. No one need be homeless, or tortured, or bossed about by bureaucrats or “top people.”
In Marx’s view it is the job of socialists to spread these ideas, to organize themselves, not apart from the everyday struggles of working people, but in intimate association with them.
The workers, who can and must rule the globe, can only come to a realization of their own potential through struggle.
In every defeat and in every partial movement, the need is for socialists to be involved in the fight, showing the way forward to working class solidarity and power.
It is not surprising that at this moment in Russia and Eastern Europe workers are rejecting “Marxism.” Faced in the 1870s with people (including his son-in-law) who misrepresented his ideas, Marx declared roundly, “I am not a Marxist.”
For over 60 years, workers have been told that “Marxism” means oppression, exploitation, and lies. For a time, that dead-weight will hold back the movement. But not for very long.
In these exciting times, the real Karl Marx can again be discovered, not as some terrible bronze statue of a God, but as an exceptionally fine old comrade and friend of the workers’ movement, with some marvelous ideas that need spreading around.
(Reprinted from: Socialist Worker)
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