Karl Marx
Page 10
Marx’s radical critique of capitalist society did not prevent him from overlooking its enormous revolutionary role in bringing about what would be called today globalization, which creates not only a world market but also a world culture.
THE TEN REGULATIONS: A PROGRAM FOR REVOLUTIONARY TRANSFORMATION
This ode to the bourgeoisie is of course dialectically subversive: it is precisely the revolutionary nature of capitalism in overhauling all hitherto existing conditions and its universal expansion that create the conditions for its internal Aufhebung and its replacement by the proletariat. More than in any of his writings, on this occasion Marx provided the most detailed program for this transformation: it is the closest he ever came to providing a plan for the proletarian revolution’s transformation of capitalism into a socialist society. Yet its sophistication, hidden behind its trenchant language, has sometimes escaped the attention of both Marx’s followers and his critics.
The program a revolutionary government should enact, according to Marx, consists of a list of ten specific measures, although these are prefaced with his customary caution: the measures, he writes, “will of course be different in different countries.” He underlines the fact that the revolutionary transformation will not be a one-time act that would change things overnight: he maintains that the proletariat “will wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie,” and further admits that initially this will be undertaken “by measures which appear economically insufficient and untenable.”
Yet this careful language should not mislead. Marx states explicitly that even these apparently limited measures have to be “effected by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production.” The apparent tension between the initially careful language and the subsequent reference to despotic means becomes clear only by carefully parsing what follows: the Ten Regulations that he suggests will need to be enacted. Marx proposes that these would apply “pretty generally in the most advanced countries,” even though they may vary from country to country. The list, revealing as it is, also hides some surprising omissions, and has to be read in toto in order to realize its complexity and cunning.
1. Abolition of property in land and the application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of all credits in the hands of the state. …
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. …
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industry; gradual abolition of all the distinctions between town and country. …
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
This is obviously a drastic program, justifying Marx’s description of its measures as “despotic inroads into property rights.” Yet despite what appears as sweeping nationalization, it does not include the immediate abolition of private property rights of the owners of industry. By contrast, it envisions a lengthy and gradual process, not a one-time act of expropriation and nationalization. This is the extremely sophisticated secret of this program: it is about a process, not a legislative fiat.
Let us go through the Ten Regulations one by one and see how nuanced and differentiated these measures are and how seriously Marx does not follow revolutionary slogans but tries to imagine how the machinery of the revolution should really work.
The Ten Regulations call for an extensive—but not total—abolition of private property rights. Private property in land is abolished (measure number 1), banks and the means of transportation (mainly railroads) are nationalized (measures 5 and 6)—but the owners of industry do not have their property immediately expropriated. They will be subject to a heavy progressive income tax (measure 2); it is only if they flee the country or are involved in rebellious activities that their property will be confiscated (measure 4); and they will not be able to leave their property to their descendants (measure 3). In the meantime, they may continue to own their factories, but will have to compete in the market against a public industrial sector set up by the state (measure 7). This public industrial sector, made up from industrial property expropriated from émigrés and rebels as well as from deceased owners whose property reverts to the state, will naturally enjoy preferential treatment from the state-owned bank and railways.
In other words: private industrial property, while not immediately nationalized, will be slowly, but surely, squeezed out of existence; its owners, unless they emigrate or rebel, will be able to continue to function, albeit under disadvantage—high taxes, competition with preferred state-owned industries. The abolition of private ownership of the means of industrial production will take place gradually and will certainly come to an end within one generation due to the abolition of the rights of inheritance.
By proposing this gradual and differentiated scheme Marx shows his understanding of the dynamics of industrial production—and of social psychology. While many radical socialists have called for immediate expropriation of all means of production, especially industrial ownership, Marx is aware that such a step would entail a major disruption of industrial production and thus confront the revolutionary government with a deep economic and financial crisis (which indeed has happened in those cases where such drastic steps have been taken). Moreover, this would also push the industrial bourgeoisie into a corner and transform many of its members into active opponents of the revolution: if they have nothing to lose, as their property has been confiscated anyway, and since they and their families were made into paupers, why should they not become active rebels and saboteurs? Marx, on the other hand, offers them the possibility of continuing to live more or less as they have been used to, implicitly also allowing them to place their children in the new social order.
Through the nuanced brutality of the complex structure introduced by the Ten Regulations, the capitalist owners of industry become, nilly-willy, passive accomplices in the socialist revolution and in their own extinction as a class; but it does not force them into the counterrevolutionary camp. Marx may not have been aware of Machiavelli’s advice to the Prince not to confiscate the property of enemies he executes: their children, he maintained in one of his more chilling statements, will more easily forgive the murder of their parents than the confiscation of their inheritance.
While the sophisticated measures dealing with transforming private into public property over time are the bedrock of the logic of the Ten Regulations, they also include other measures that are both quite despotic but deeply transformative. The imposition of a universal duty to be part of the working population and the creation of labor brigades involving overcoming the distinction between town and country (measures 8 and 9) are accompanied by what may look surprising: his guarded statement about the abolition of child labor “in its present form” (measure 10). Keeping in mind that Marx viewed labor—the transformation of nature and man’s self-realization—as the foundation of every human being as Homo faber, one can well follow the logic of his thinking: free education for all children should not mean just classical humanistic education, but an attempt to prepare the young for a life of labor—obviously not under the horrible conditions of the industrial revolution. Making every child study philosophy and learn Latin and Greek (as Marx himself did) is not the answer: education should be universal, but attuned to each human’s role as a creator.
Marx has no problem calling the Ten Regulations the expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat (one of the few instances he uses the term). Yet using the term in this specific context mean
s both more and less than one imagines. To Marx, all political power is a dictatorship—the rule of one class over the other, so the proletarian revolution in its first, political stage as expressed by the Ten Regulations is no exception. If capitalism is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the despotic measures of the Ten Regulations are obviously the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The only difference—and what according to Marx grants the dictatorship of the proletariat legitimacy—is that this dictatorship is of the majority over the minority, while all previous forms of government were the dictatorship of a minority. Hence he adds what appears to be both a contradiction and a piece of cynical propaganda: “The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.” But to him it is obvious and in a way self-evident, given the meaning of democracy as majority rule.
Yet as in the EPM, Marx is aware that this first stage of communism—the rule of the proletariat as the dominant class—cannot be the ultimate goal of the revolution, nor is it yet the true realization of socialism. He therefore goes on to suggest that the Ten Regulations are merely a necessary step toward the transcendence—Aufhebung—of political power as such. But just as in the EPM, his language, while inspiring, remains vague.
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. … The working class will then have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
Again, Marx is true to his own principles of not being able or willing to give a full picture of a distant future. So before moving on to the critique of utopian socialism, he ends this section of the Manifesto with a soaring passage that certainly can also be criticized as utopian—though the Ten Regulations suggest that when it comes to the proximate and immediate steps of the future revolution, Marx was at least far more concrete than those he was criticizing:
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.
Looking at this in the context of Marx’s previous writings, one sees a clear reference here to the social essence of the human as Homo faber, where labor brings out both individual self-realization as well as the immanent need for the other.
The following sections of the Manifesto deal with various socialist thinkers and movements and then with how the League of Communists relates to different radical, not necessarily socialist, groups in various European countries. This section is of less theoretical interest and in many respects repeats what he wrote previously on these issues. There is, however, a somewhat surprising comment about Germany.
One would expect Marx to assume that the revolution would first break out in the most industrially developed country—England. Yet in a strategically insightful passage he expresses a totally different view.
It is to Germany that the Communists chiefly turn their attention, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the 17th century and that of France in the 18th century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.
It may of course also be that this identification of Germany as the focus of the next revolution had to do with the fact that the League of Communists, for all its internationalist aims and ideology, was primarily an association of German revolutionaries. Nevertheless, this pivot to the least developed major European society as the weak link of the existing order suggests a dialectical rather than a mere linear grasp of historical development. It would also determine to a large extent the trajectory of Marx’s activities during the revolutionary years of 1848–49. Germany, rather than England or France, would be the center of his theoretical and practical efforts. It was of course also his own country.
1848 AND THE NEUE RHEINISCHE ZEITUNG
Like everyone else, Marx was taken by surprise by the outbreak of the 1848 revolutions—which started in late February in Paris, quickly followed by uprisings in mid-March in Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin, and in most western continental European capitals. The post-1815 conservative Restoration, with its reactionary and oppressive politics, appeared to have come to an end. Monarchy was abolished in France, most crowned heads yielded to demands for elections, provisional governments were established, elected parliaments were rapidly convened. Perhaps the most notable of these changes was the convening in Frankfurt in May 1848 of the first elected all-German National Assembly. It appeared that representative governments were about to be set up, and in Germany and Italy national unification seemed all of a sudden a distinct possibility, combining liberalism and nationalism.
The Democratic Association in Brussels, of which Marx was one of its leading members, immediately sent a congratulatory letter to the Provisional Government in Paris, which responded by rescinding the 1845 order that had expelled Marx and some of his colleagues from France. At the same time, the Belgian government, which tried to keep above the fray, expelled Marx from Brussels, and on 4th March, he and his family left for Paris.
During the following months, Marx was involved in two parallel tracks. He continued his activity in the League of Communists, the center of which had moved to Paris; it maintained that what was happening was an all-European eruption and was looking forward to pushing the revolutionary energy toward socialist goals. At the same time, it is obvious that Marx focused primarily on developments in Germany, where the major issue was promoting—along with moderate liberals—German unification.
The tension between these two agendas becomes clear in a document written by Marx but also signed by Engels, Wilhelm Wolff (one of Marx’s closest friends in the League of Communists), and others, on behalf of the League and published in Paris in late March, subsequently republished in German radical newspapers once censorship had been lifted.
The document starts with the battle cry of The Communist Manifesto (“Proletarians of all countries, unite!”)—but its first paragraph deals with Germany and demands that “The whole of Germany shall be declared a single indivisible republic.” It goes on to call for an elected all-German national assembly, defines who shall be eligible to vote, and calls for the abolition of all feudal and seigniorial rights—implying the dismantling of the various royal and ducal powers of the thirty-seven different German states as established by the Congress of Vienna. In combining this call for German unification with demanding that “the estates of princes and other feudal estates and all mines, pits etc. shall become the property of the state,” it echoes, though in a slightly attenuated way, regulation number 1 of the Manifesto.
Echoes of the Manifesto’s socialist ideas, albeit in a milder form, can be further gleaned from the document: a state bank should replace private banking and be the sole source of credit; railways should be nationalized; “severely progressive” taxation should be introduced and consumption taxes abolished; there should be “restrictions on the right of inheritance” (not its total abolition as suggested in the Manifesto); universal popular education should be introduced, and national workshops established. To all this a “complete separation of church and state” is also added.
This is obviously a wish list much more than a program, and it is not at all clear what institutions should be set up to carry out these actions. Clearly the document was written under the immediate impact of the surprising developments of the first weeks of the revolutions that swept both France and Germany. The oscillation between a German nationalist agenda and calls for radical socialist measures shows that, although in the Manifesto Marx envisaged the proposed Ten Regulations as a program for a proletarian revolution, here he and his colleagues were not altogether clear whether they were at
a threshold of democratic republicanism, German national unification—or the beginning of a radical all-European socialist revolution.
But what became clear on a personal level was Marx’s decision to return to Germany. In 1845 he had renounced his Prussian citizenship so as not to fall even indirectly under the jurisdiction of his country of birth. Now he and his colleagues were able to renew their contacts with the people in Cologne who in 1842–43 had helped to set up the Rheinische Zeitung, and on 12th April 1848, Marx arrived in Cologne to take up the position of editor-in-chief of the newly established Neue Rheinische Zeitung. He was accompanied by Engels, who left his family business in Manchester to join in the revolutionary developments. The paper’s first issue appeared on 31st May 1848; Marx held the position of editor until the NRZ was closed by the authorities a year later.
This was a year of turbulent activities for Marx, as the editor for a paper that called itself the “Organ for Democracy” and was not identified with the much more radical ideas of the League of Communists, of which he continued to be a member. As editor, Marx advocated mainly democratic and constitutional reforms and supported the liberal attempts, centered on the National Assembly in Frankfurt, to set up a unified German state, even if the only way of reaching this outcome would fall far short of the initial goal of establishing a German democratic republic. At the same time, his leading articles in the NRZ supported the (failed) Paris workers insurrection in June 1848, and his own travels to Berlin and Vienna brought him in contact with radical groups close to the League of Communists.