The life and teaching of Karl Marx Part 6

The dialectical movement will be incomplete if the working cla.s.s does not take its fate into its own hands, and is not convinced that it has the power to achieve its own emanc.i.p.ation, and therefore contents itself with small social reforms, or relies on n.o.ble-minded and benevolent men and heroic redeemers. This was actually the case in the beginnings of the Socialist movement, when the workers saw in Socialism the only way out, but were still too weak to take their fate into their own hands. This was the period which Marx called Utopian, when outstanding personalities spread Socialist ideas, and made Socialist plans and experiments to free the labouring ma.s.ses. As these personalities knew the impotence of the ma.s.ses, they turned to philanthropists and humane rulers, and sought to convince them that reason, justice, and the general welfare demanded that Socialism should be introduced, and poverty, misery, and their consequences abolished. This period of Utopian Socialism gave way before the further development of industry, the progress of machine technique, the centralisation and concentration of the means of production and exchange, which brought with it an increase in the number, strength, organisation, and cla.s.s-consciousness of the working cla.s.ses. It is the centralisation of the means of production and exchange, in particular, which renders it possible for the working cla.s.s, by paralysing industry and power stations, to cause the whole of society to feel that living labour-power forms the soul of the economic life.

At the same time Socialist investigators appear, who not only show the reasonableness and justice of Socialism, but exhibit the proof that the new economic order of Socialism is being prepared in the womb of Capitalism, and that therefore the aspirations of the worker are in harmony with the course of social development.

In this wise, a science and an aspiring Socialist movement founded upon reality develops from Utopian Socialism, and, conscious of cla.s.s, of power, and of aim, enters upon the decisive struggle with the capitalist economic order. The cla.s.s struggle acts as a lever of social revolution.

The original antagonism of the worker and capitalist over wages and hours of labour becomes am impa.s.sionate struggle of two cla.s.ses over the question of the maintenance or transformation of the social and economic system--one of which cla.s.ses fights for the existing order of private property and the other for the coming Socialistic system.

Great social cla.s.s struggles inevitably become political struggles.

The immediate object of the struggle is the possession of the power of the State, with the aid of which the capitalist cla.s.s endeavours to maintain its position, whilst the working cla.s.s aims at the conquest of the power of the State in order to accomplish its larger objects.

The following chapter will show the direction taken by the Labour movement. Here we will but briefly refer to the profound influence of Marx's doctrine of the cla.s.s struggle as exercised in political thought. Prior to Marx, political thought and the struggles of political parties seemed to revolve around ideas and great personalities. Idealogy and hero-worship were prevalent. Now, political thought, consciously or unconsciously, proceeds along cla.s.s and economic lines. This is equally true of historical investigations.

These new political and historical orientations are largely the result of Marx's life-work.

Rigidly conceived and applied, the Marxian doctrine of the cla.s.s-struggle may lead to ultra-revolutionary tactics of the Socialist and Labour movement, to the system of Workers' Councils, and Proletarian Dictatorship. If the emerging cla.s.s and its struggle const.i.tutes the lever of social revolution and the impulse of the dialectical social process, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is justified, and in any case, democracy, which includes both the capitalist and working cla.s.s, cannot be the State form during the transition period from private property to Socialism. Considered from the economic standpoint, political democracy is generally impossible, or only sham democracy so long as economic inequality exists. The Communist Manifesto does not contain a single political democratic reform. The conclusion can be drawn from Marx's idea, as a whole, that in his estimation, the cla.s.s stood higher than so-called democracy.

This is one of the sources of Bolshevism.

III. THE ROLE OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT AND THE PROLETARIAN DICTATORSHIP.

The Labour Party is the political expression of the whole Trade Union movement so far as the latter formulates national demands, directed towards the State and society generally. The Labour Party will function the more effectively, and be able to accomplish its allotted task, as its foundation--the Trade Union movement--becomes established and strengthened, and the more comprehensive will be its effects. The Trade Unions are not merely to be satisfied with the work of the present, but are to become the focus and centre of gravity of the proletarian aspirations which arise out of the social transformation process, and are to work for the abolition of Capitalism. The most effective lever for the achievement of this object is the conquest of political power. With its aid the proletariat can consciously carry out the transformation of a Capitalist into a Communist society. To this transformation, there also corresponds a political transition period, the state of which can be nothing else than a revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat.--(Marx, Letter to the German Social Democracy, 1875, on their Gotha Programme.)

Marx considered himself to be the real author of the idea of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In a letter written by him, in 1852, to his American friend, Weydemeyer, he declares:

"As far as I am concerned, I can't claim to have discovered the existence of cla.s.ses in modern society or their strife against one another. Middle-cla.s.s historians long ago described the evolution of the cla.s.s struggles, and political economists showed the economic physiology of the cla.s.ses. I have added as a new contribution the following propositions: (1) that the existence of cla.s.ses is bound up with certain phases of material production; (2) that the cla.s.s struggle leads necessarily to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat; (3) that this dictatorship is but the transition to the abolition of all cla.s.ses and to the creation of a society of free and equal."--("Neue Zeit," Vol.

XXV., second part, p. 164.)

With the exception of the year 1870, Marx remained true to his doctrine of Proletarian Dictatorship: he thought in 1875 as he did in 1847, when he sketched the groundwork of the Proletarian Dictatorship in the Communist Manifesto:

"The first step in the revolution by the working cla.s.s is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling cla.s.s, to win the battle of democracy.

"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling cla.s.s; 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 revolutionising the mode of production."

But suppose that it is not the revolutionary working cla.s.s which first attains to power in the revolution, but the democracy of the lower middle cla.s.s and the social reformists. In this case, Marx gives the following advice: "Separate from it, and fight it." In the address to the League of Communists in 1850 he said:

"It may be taken for granted that in the b.l.o.o.d.y conflicts that are coming, as in the case of previous ones, the courage, resolution, and sacrifice of the workers will be the chief factor in the attainment of victory. As. .h.i.therto, so in this struggle, the ma.s.s of the lower middle cla.s.s will maintain an att.i.tude of delay, irresolution, and inactivity as long as possible, in order that, as soon as victory is a.s.sured, to arrogate it to themselves and call on the workers to remain quiet, return to work, avoid so-called excesses, and to exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. It is not in the power of the workers to hinder the lower middle cla.s.ses from doing this, but it is within their power to render their success over the armed proletariat very difficult, to dictate to them such conditions that from the beginning the rule of the middle-cla.s.s democrats is doomed to failure, and its later subst.i.tution by the rule of the proletariat is considerably facilitated.

"The workers must, during the conflict and immediately afterwards, as much as ever possible, oppose the compromises of the middle cla.s.s, and compel the democrats to execute their present terrorist threats. They must aim at preventing the subsiding of the revolutionary excitement immediately after the victory. On the contrary, they must endeavour to maintain it as long as possible.

"Far from opposing so-called excesses, and making examples of hated individuals or public buildings to which hateful remembrances are attached, by sacrificing them to the popular rage, such examples must not only be tolerated, but their direction must even be taken in hand. During the struggle and after the struggle, the workers must seize every opportunity to present their own demands side by side with those of the middle-cla.s.s democrats. The workers must demand guarantees as soon as the middle-cla.s.s democrats propose to take the government in hand. If necessary, these guarantees must be exacted, and the new rulers must be compelled to make every possible promise and concession, which is the surest way to compromise them. The workers must size up the conditions in a cool and dispa.s.sionate fashion, and manifest open distrust of the new Government, in order to quench, as much as possible, the ardour for the new order of things and the elation which follows every successful street fight. Against the new official Government, they must set up a revolutionary workers'

government, either in the form of local committees, communal councils, or workers' clubs or workers' committees, so that the democratic middle-cla.s.s government not only immediately loses its support amongst the working cla.s.ses, but from the commencement finds itself supervised and threatened by a jurisdiction, behind which stands the entire ma.s.s of the working cla.s.s. In a word: from the first moment of victory the workers must no longer level their distrust against the defeated reactionary party, but direct it against their former allies, who would seek to exploit the common victory for their own ends.

The workers must be armed and organised to enable them to threaten energetic opposition to this party, whose treason to the workers will commence in the first hour of victory. The arming of the whole proletariat with rifles and ammunition must be carried out at once, and steps taken to prevent the reviving of the old militia, which would be directed against the workers.

But should this not be successful, the workers must endeavour to organise themselves as an independent guard, choosing their own chief and general staff, with orders to support not the State power, but the councils formed by the workers. Where workers are employed in State service, they must arm and organise in a special corps, with a chief chosen by themselves, or form a part of the Proletarian Guard. Under no pretext must they give up their arms and equipment, and any attempt at disarmament must be forcibly resisted. Destruction of the influence of the middle-cla.s.s democrats over the workers, immediate independent and armed organisation of the workers, and the imposition of the most irksome and compromising conditions possible upon the rule of the bourgeois democracy, which is for the time unavoidable.... We have noted that the Democrats come to power in the next phase of the movement, and how they will be obliged to impose measures of a more or less Socialistic nature. It will be asked what contrary measures should be proposed by the workers. Naturally, in the beginning of the movement the workers cannot propose actual Communist measures, but they can (1) compel the Democrats to attack the old social order from as many sides as possible, disturb its regular course, and compromise themselves, and concentrate in the hands of the State as much as possible of the productive forces, means of transport, factories, railways, etc. (2) When the Democrats propose measures which are not revolutionary, but merely reformist, the workers must press them to the point of turning such measures into direct attacks on private property; thus, for example, if the small middle cla.s.s propose to purchase the railways and factories the workers must demand that such railways and factories, being the property of the reactionaries, shall be simply confiscated by the State, without compensation. If the Democrats propose a proportional tax, the workers must demand a progressive tax; if the Democrats themselves declare for a moderate progressive tax, the workers must insist on a tax so steeply graduated as to cause the collapse of large fortunes; if the Democrats demand the regulation of the State debt, the workers must demand State bankruptcy. Thus the demands of the workers must everywhere be directed against the concessions and measures of the Democrats.... Further, the Democrats will either work directly for a Federal Republic, or, at least, if they cannot avoid the Republic one and indivisible, will seek to paralyse it by granting the greatest possible independence to the munic.i.p.alities and provinces. The workers must set themselves against this plan, not only to secure the one and indivisible German Republic, but to concentrate as much power as possible in the hands of the State. They need not be misled by democratic plat.i.tudes about the freedom of the Communes, self-determination, etc. Their battle-cry must be 'the revolution in permanence.'"

This Address of Marx, written in 1850, appears to be the guide of the Bolsheviks and Spartacists.

The working cla.s.ses may, however, not expect their immediate emanc.i.p.ation from their political victory.

"In order to work out their own emanc.i.p.ation, and with it that higher form of life which present-day society inevitably opposes, the protracted struggle must pa.s.s through a whole series of historical processes, in the course of which men and circ.u.mstances alike will be changed. They have no ideal to realise; they have only to set free the elements of the new society, which have already developed in the womb of the collapsing bourgeois society."--(Marx, "Civil War in France.")

The means of production will gradually be socialised, production will be placed on a co-operative basis, education will be combined with productive work, in order to transform the members of society into producers. So long as the transition period lasts the Communist maxim, "From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs," cannot become operative. For this period is in every respect--economic, social, and intellectual--still tainted with the marks of the old society, and "rights cannot transcend the economic structure of society, and the cultural development which it determines."--(Criticism of Gotha Program.) To each will be given according to his deeds.

"Accordingly the individual producer will receive back what he gives to society, after deductions for government, education, and other social charges. He will give society his individual quota of labour.

For example: the social working day consists in the sum total of individual working days; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day which he contributes; his share thereof. He will receive from society a certificate that he has performed so much work (after deducting his work for social funds), and with this certificate he will draw from the social provision of articles of consumption as much as a similar quant.i.ty of labour costs. The same quant.i.ty of labour as he will give to society in one form he will receive back in another.... The right of producers will be proportionate to the work they will perform: the equality will consist in the application of the same measure: labour."

Because performances will vary in accordance with unequal gifts and degrees of diligence, an unequal distribution will actually take place during the transition period. Only in a fully developed Communistic society, after the distinction between intellectual and physical labour has disappeared, when productive activity has become a first need of life, when the all-round development of the individual and the productive forces has been achieved, and all the springs of co-operative riches flow abundantly; only then can the narrow middle-cla.s.s idea of rights be improved on, and the Communist principle of equality be put into operation.

Marx, who reasoned on strictly economic lines, and placed the emanc.i.p.ation of the working cla.s.s as the highest goal, to which all other political and economic movements are subordinated, did not mistake the economic, political, and historical role of the nation: this is shown by the Communist Manifesto, where the creation of the national State by the bourgeoisie is indicated. He mocked at the young enthusiasts who thought they could brush aside the nation as an obsolete prejudice, but, in spite of this, he considerably under-estimated the unifying force of national feeling, considered from a biological and cultural point of view. He divided civilised mankind into antagonistic cla.s.ses, and a.s.sumed that the economic dividing lines would prove to be more effective than national and political boundary lines. He was, therefore, through and through international. Marx demanded that the national Labour Parties should act internationally as soon as there was a possibility of the collapse of the capitalist domination. He reproached the original Gotha program with the fact that "it borrowed from middle-cla.s.s Leagues of Peace and Freedom the phrase of the international brotherhood of peoples, whereas it was necessary to promote the international combination of the working cla.s.ses in a common struggle against the ruling cla.s.ses and their Governments." Marx had no confidence in the pacifism of the bourgeoisie.

IV. OUTLINES OF THE ECONOMIC DOCTRINES.

1. _Capital._

As we already know, Marx became a Socialist in the year 1843. As a believer in dialectics, he knew that Socialism can only be understood by a knowledge of the movement operating in middle-cla.s.s society and its developing forces. His investigations in 1843-4 led to the result that political economy forms the basis of bourgeois society.

Henceforth political economy became the chief department of his studies. His comprehensive studies of French and English economists, especially Sismondi and Ricardo, and the anti-capitalist literature of England of the years 1820-40, which were connected with the Ricardian theory of value, furnished him with a wealth of suggestions and materials for the criticism of political economy, for the source and origin and development and decline of capitalism, written from the standpoint of the working cla.s.s and the coming Socialistic society.

Such a work is "Capital." It consists of three volumes. Only the first volume (1867) was carried through the press by Marx himself. The other two volumes he only sketched, and they were completed and published by Engels after Marx's death.

The first volume deals with the origin and tendencies of large industrial capital, with the immediate and simple process of commodity production, so far as it concerns the relations between employer and worker, the exploitation of the proletariat, wages and labour time, and the influence of modern technique on the condition of the worker.

We see in the first volume the effect of the factory system in creating capital. Its chief figure is the producing, suffering, rebellious working cla.s.s. In the second volume, the employer appears on the market, sells his commodities, and sets the wheels of production again in motion, so that commodities will continue to be produced. In the third volume, the realisation process of the undertakings of the capitalist cla.s.s, or the movement of capital as a whole is exhibited: cost of production, cost price, total gains and their division into profit, interest and ground rent. The first volume presents the greatest difficulties. The tremendous efforts of the author to produce a masterpiece unnecessarily refined and sublimated and overloaded with learning the doctrines of value and surplus value until they attained the level of a philosophy, an example of Hegelian logic. He played with his subject like an intellectual athlete. That Marx could handle complicated economic questions in a clear, vigorous manner is shown by the third volume, which is written just as it came out of the author's head, and without the apparatus of learning subsequently erected, without the crutches of notes and polemico-philosophical excursions.

To understand "Capital" it is necessary to bear in mind that (1) Marx regarded the scientifically discovered principles as the real inner being of things, practice he regarded as the superficial appearance of things, capable of being apprehended empirically; for example, Value is the theoretical expression, Price the empirical; Surplus Value is the theoretical, and Profit the empirical expression; the appearances apprehended by experience (Price and Profit) deviate indeed from theory, but without the theory they cannot be understood; (2) he looked at the capitalist economic system as being essentially free from external hindrances and disturbances, free from invasions both by the State and the proletariat: the Labour struggles of factory protection laws of which Marx speaks in "Capital" serve rather to perfect the productive forces than to restrict the exploiting proclivities of sovereign capital.

2. _Value._

The life and motion of capitalistic society appears as an infinite net of exchange operations, formed out of numerous entwined meshes.

Through the medium of money, men continually exchange the most varied commodities and services. A ceaseless buying and selling, an uninterrupted series of exchanges of things, and labour power--this const.i.tutes the essential part of human relations in capitalistic society. An economic map of these relations, graphically displayed, would not be less confusing than an astronomical map which exhibited the manifold and intersected orbits of the heavenly bodies. And yet there must be some rule or law which operates in this seeming medley of movements; for men do not work or exchange their goods by hazard, like savages who give their entire lumps of gold or rough diamonds for a necklace of gla.s.s pearls. The English and French economists in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, amongst whom Petty (1623-87), Quesnay (1694-1759), Adam Smith (1723-96), and Ricardo (1772-1823) were the most original, sought for the laws which regulated exchange operations, and their theories were designated by Marx as cla.s.sical bourgeois economy. Following up their investigations, Marx declared: Every commodity, that is, every thing or good produced under Capitalism and brought to the market possesses a use value and an exchange value.

The use value is the utility of the commodity to satisfy a physical or mental need of its user: a commodity without use value is not exchangeable or saleable. As use values, commodities are materially different from each other; n.o.body will exchange a ton of wheat for a ton of wheat of the same kind, but he will for clothes.

In what measure will commodities exchange with one another? The measure is the exchange value, and this consists in the trouble and quant.i.ty of labour which the production of a commodity costs. Equal quant.i.ties of labour are exchanged with each other on the market. As exchange values, as the embodiment of human labour, commodities are essentially equal to each other, only quant.i.tatively are they different, as different categories of commodities embody different quant.i.ties of labour. It is obvious that the quant.i.ties of labour will not be calculated according to the working methods of the individual producers, but according to the prevailing social working methods.

If, for example, hand-weaver A requires twenty hours for the production of a piece of cloth, which in a modern factory will be produced in five hours, the cloth of the hand-weaver does not therefore possess four-fold exchange value. If hand-weaver A demands of consumer B an equivalent of twenty working hours, B answers that a similar piece of cloth can be produced in five hours, and therefore it only represents an exchange value of five working hours. Thus, according to Marx, the exchange value of a commodity consists in the quant.i.ty of socially necessary labour power which its reproduction would require.

This quant.i.ty of labour is no constant factor. New inventions, improvements in labour processes, increase in the productivity of labour, etc., cause a diminution in the quant.i.ty of labour necessary for the reproduction of a commodity; its exchange value, or expressed in terms of money, its price, will therefore sink, provided that other things (demand, medium of exchange) remain equal.

Consequently, labour is the source of exchange value, and the latter is the principle which regulates exchange operations. Exchange value even measures the extent of the commodity wealth of society. Wealth may increase in volume, but decrease in value, in so far as a less quant.i.ty of socially necessary labour becomes necessary for its reproduction.

The more progressive a country is industrially and the higher the level of its civilisation, the greater is its wealth, and the smaller is the quant.i.ty of labour which must be expended on the creation of wealth. In the practical Labour politics of our times, this is expressed in higher wages and shorter working hours.

It was said above that use value is a basic condition for the exchange of the individual commodity. This does not exhaust the role of use value. The quant.i.ty of use value of which society has need determines the quant.i.ty of the exchange values to be created. If more commodities are required than society requires, the superfluous commodities have no exchange value, in spite of the labour that is expended on them.--("Capital" (German), Vol. III., 1, pp. 175-176.)

The complete realisation of exchange values or the social labour that is performed depends, as is seen, on the adaptation of supply to demand, and is a matter of organisation, of social direction.

We have noticed that the Marxian theory of value is related to that of the cla.s.sical economists, but they are by no means the same thing.

Apart from some improvements and definitions which Marx made, they are distinguished by the following conceptions: In the cla.s.sical theory of value, the capitalist who directs production and provides with his capital the tools and raw materials of labour, markets the finished commodity, and keeps going the processes of reproduction, appears as the only creator of value: the wage worker is only one of his means of production. In the Marxian theory of value, on the other hand, the wage worker who transforms the raw materials into commodities, or removes the raw materials to the place of production, appears as the sole creator of value. Value is only created by the worker in production, and in distribution connected therewith.