Marx- The Key Ideas

by Gill Hands

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  Insight

  The Critique of the Gotha Programme was a commentary made about the Gotha Conference and was not published until after Marx’s death. It is one of the few texts where Marx discusses the ways in which a future communist society might be organized.

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  Dictatorship of the proletariat was a phrase that Marx hardly used at all in his work but the theory was developed by Lenin, the Russian communist leader, at the start of the first Communist Revolution, and came to popular attention. Dictatorship of the proletariat is a phrase that people today tend to relate to the way both Lenin and Stalin ruled the Soviet Union using non-democratic methods. Marx used the word dictatorship in its original sense: rule by a group of people, rather than by one despot. It was based on the model of the Roman dictatura: rule by an elite in times of crisis.

  Marx believed that capitalist society was in effect a ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’, for they controlled society through laws, education and ideology and would not give this up easily. He believed that the only way that the workers would be able to keep hold of power after a revolution was for them to take control of the state apparatus themselves and to rule in their own interests. He had studied the Paris commune and was impressed by the way in which it was proposed that all officials, including judges, were to be voted for by universal suffrage. All officials were to be paid the same as workers and the standing army was to be replaced by a citizens’ army. The police and clergy would not be allowed to hold political office. In this way, the workers would have control of the apparatus of society – schools, courts, prisons, the armed forces – but in an open and democratic way. It would also prevent the bourgeoisie from being able to reorganize a counter-revolution easily.

  In 1917 Lenin developed the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat in The State and Revolution. His definition of dictatorship as ‘exercise of power without law’, was very different from that used by Marx. Lenin believed that because ideology and false consciousness had such a hold over the minds of everyone, certain select members of the Communist Party would have to act as the vanguard of the proletariat. They would lead society into a true understanding of communism. He believed that, even after a revolution, the bourgeoisie would remain stronger than the proletariat because they would still have money and property, better education and connections, and be more experienced in public office and in the ‘art of war’. He proposed that a ‘class dictatorship’ was necessary in Russia and force should be used against the former ruling class.

  During the Russian Civil War, all political parties, except the Bolshevik ones that supported Lenin, were abolished one by one on various trumped-up charges, so that eventually only one party remained: the Bolsheviks. After Lenin’s death, in-fighting among the Bolsheviks was eventually overcome by the iron rule of Stalin.

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  Insight

  The Bolsheviks were members of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split away from the more moderate Mensheviks in 1903. They eventually became the ruling communist party in the Soviet Union.

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  Freedom of speech was virtually abolished and any dissent was ruthlessly suppressed. One ruling elite was replaced by another; this was a distortion of what Marx had believed in.

  Communist society

  Marx believed that once the proletariat had achieved state power they could take control of the means of production and, eventually, class distinctions would be abolished and a classless communist society would be the result. Society would not be based on one class exploiting another class; workers would be in control of the means of production and they would use the wealth produced for the good of society as a whole. Society would be a self-governing community.

  Marx believed society would eventually be stateless because he believed the state was a tool that let one branch of society oppress another. He felt that when classes were finally abolished then ‘the power of the state, whose function is to keep the great majority of producers beneath the yoke of a small minority of exploiters, will disappear and government functions will be transformed into simple administrative functions’.

  After the revolution, the state would ‘wither away’ as there would be no oppression, but it would take time. Engels said that ‘the proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But in doing this it abolishes itself as the proletariat’. In order to do this, society would need to be more productive with a much shorter working day so that people would have time to participate in running society.

  Because he believed the ownership of property defines the class system, it was important to Marx that private property should be abolished. This would mean that classes would eventually cease to exist, so there would be no inequality and no need for further class struggle. He also thought that when the means of production were centralized, private property would disappear and money would then cease to exist.

  Marx and Engels firmly believed that the revolution would be an international one. This would mean that the army would have a purely internal peacekeeping function and money would not need to be spent on defence.

  The main writings we have on the form that a communist society would take are The Principles of Communism, written by Engels in 1847. These set out the views of the Communist League, of which Marx was a member. These are the main points of the document:

  Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, inheritance tax and abolition of inheritance rights for the family.

  Capitalists to be expropriated through competition with state industry and partial compensation.

  Confiscation of the possessions of emigrants and rebels against the majority.

  Central organization of wages for workers on the land or in factories. Competition between workers to be abolished.

  All members of society to be equally liable for work until private property is abolished. Industrial armies to be formed, especially for agriculture.

  Private banks to be suppressed and money and credit to be centralized in national banks.

  State-owned factories, workshops, etc. to be developed as far as economically feasible; agriculture to be improved.

  Education for all children at state schools, paid for by the State.

  Communal dwellings to be built on waste land to combine the best of rural and urban life.

  Unhygienic, badly built slum housing to be destroyed.

  Equal inheritance rights for children born out of wedlock.

  Transport to be nationalized.

  It was not considered feasible that all these changes could take place at once. It was felt that once one change was made others would follow and they would accumulate. The abolition of private property would be the first step and then agriculture, transport and trade would be centralized.

  Marx and Engels didn’t consider the future communist society to be a utopian one or that it was based on utopian principles. They wrote in The Communist Manifesto, ‘the theoretical conclusions of the communists are in no way based on the ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered by this or that would-be universal reformer’. Engels was a great admirer of Fourier though, as can be seen in his idea of building communal dwellings combining urban and rural living.

  Marx did not want a return to some idealized rural society; he saw that technological progress was one of the main benefits that capitalism had brought to society and he believed that development of this would lead to huge improvements in society. In this way, his ideas were closer to those of Saint-Simon’s technocracy. In the Grundrisse, Marx writes that work would become ‘an automatic system of machinery’. He believed that manual labour would be reduced by a mixture of ‘social combination’ and the ‘technological application of the natural sciences’. This would allow for more leisure time and time for education. It would help society to become stateless because the working week would be shorter and everyone would be able t
o participate in running society. It would also lead to material abundance for all.

  Surplus labour would still exist but it would not be hidden by any kind of exploitation or fetishism. In the third volume of Das Kapital, Marx had the idea that these surpluses would be used in a kind of welfare state. Everyone who could work would have to work, but the surplus product would be set aside and divided between those who could not support themselves; those who ‘on account of age are not yet, or no longer able to take part in production’. He did not believe that anyone else should be supported by the state though, for he also wrote that, ‘all labour to support those who do not work would cease’.

  Communist society would be a hardworking and productive place, but both Marx and Engels hoped that work in a communist society would be enjoyable and not an oppressive means of survival. It was hoped that after the initial stages of communism, where people were still attached to old capitalist ways of thinking, then a communist society would take into account people’s varying needs and abilities. Marx wrote in the Gotha Programme:

  In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

  Religion

  ‘Religion is the opium of the people’, is one of Marx’s most famous quotations. Opium is an addictive drug that dulls the senses; Marx believed that religion had a similar function in capitalist society.

  Marx had seen some of the problems that religion caused to his own family when his father renounced his Jewish faith. Prussia was an anti-Semitic country and Jews were not allowed to hold public office. He saw that religion was a part of the state system that could be used as a form of oppression and as a part of the false consciousness that added to the alienation of the populace.

  Marx himself was an atheist and was greatly influenced by materialist philosophers and free thinkers such as Hume and Diderot, who had concentrated on finding rational arguments against religion. Being believers in scientific order and rationalism, they thought they could prove by scientific means that God could not exist. They thought that most people had a superstitious belief in God that would disappear when they were enlightened by the powers of reason.

  Marx agreed with these rationalist philosophers to some extent, but his views on alienation meant that he believed that a purely rationalist view of the world was not enough to change it. He was greatly influenced by Feuerbach, who said the essence of Christianity was the essence of mankind itself. Marx believed that God was created by human consciousness and was a product of human minds, but he wanted to understand why people worshipped God and why their religious beliefs took the form that they did. Again, he spent many years researching and analysing societies past and present, this time to find evidence on the question of religion.

  Eventually, he came to the conclusion that religion is part of the ideological make-up of society:

  In primitive societies, where people’s lives are dependent on their relationship with the natural world, religion helps to unite them with nature. Natural forces are worshipped as gods and the natural cycles of their world become part of the religion.

  In more developed societies, people become freed from their dependence on nature by use of technology but they feel alienated from the society because they have little control over their daily lives. People then use religion as a means of expressing their frustrations.

  Marx believed that any fulfilment people achieved from religion was illusory because religion is just another form of alienation. People do not realize they are not free and, until they do, they cannot change society so there is little to be achieved by demonstrating a lack of science and reason in religion. In this way, he differed from the philosophers who came before him; Hegel, Feuerbach and the other Young Hegelians. They believed the alienation people felt was because they did not understand the progress of the universal mind and once they saw their place in this, through philosophical enlightenment, they would see things clearly, as they truly are, and without any religious false consciousness. Their lives would then have meaning.

  Marx believed that people felt that their lives were meaningless because they were actually meaningless. Capitalism is a social system that means we are unfulfilled as human beings. ‘Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’

  Marx could see that religion served a very important function in capitalist society. Religion acknowledges the alienation of the individual but says this is because they are separated from God. This is useful, for it stops people questioning whether their feelings are due to the way their society is structured. They feel that alienation is a part of the natural condition of humanity.

  Religion leads people to believe that there is a purpose to their suffering which they might not understand but gives promises of an afterlife if they follow certain spiritual practices. It exaggerates the alienation of the individual and offers them a long-term cure at the same time. It also brings reassurance, for many people need their religious illusions as a prop and as a comfort in a harsh environment.

  Marx saw that merely understanding the problem was not enough; philosophy itself cannot change the world. Understanding why you feel alienated is only the beginning.

  Religion will only cease to exist when alienation ceases to exist and this cannot happen until certain classes are no longer oppressed and everybody becomes equal in a communist society: ‘The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.’

  Women’s rights and the family

  In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels take great pains to point out that the communists are not about to introduce ‘a community of women’ and break up the family. They had been accused of this in the press several times that year. Some of their liberal views on the institution of marriage shocked staid Victorian Britain and caused a minor sensation. At that time, women in most capitalist countries did not have the vote and in the eyes of the law they were seen as possessions belonging to their husbands. A community of women implied women who would be free to give their sexual favours to anyone they chose. Marx pointed out in The Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie used their wives like instruments of production and feared that, as instruments of production were to be exploited, then the same fate would happen to their wives. He argued that marriage could be considered as a legalized form of prostitution, ‘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 want to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women.’ He draws the conclusion that only through the abolition of the class system would prostitution, ‘both public and private’, be abolished.

  Much of Marxist thought on women and the family arises from the work of Engels. There are no other communist writers of that time who wrote on the rights of women as being separate from the rights of workers as a whole class.

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  Insight

  Engels was probably influenced on these points by his Chartist lover, Mary Burns.

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  Engels was a great admirer of Fourier, an early advocate of women’s rights who invented the term feminism and proposed a utopia of communes
and ‘free love’. In 1845 Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In this, he argues that monogamous marriage is a social institution that exists in relation to private property and that women must be economically independent from men before they can be truly emancipated. One of the most well-known quotations from this work is, ‘The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised enslavement of the woman.’ Engels believed that all women were a slave class under capitalism, proletariat and bourgeois alike:

  When she fulfils her duties in the private service of her family, she remains excluded from public production and cannot earn anything; and when she wishes to take part in public industry and earn her living independently, she is not in a position to fulfil her family duties. What applies to the woman in the factory applies to her in all professions, right up to medicine and law.

  Marx wanted everybody to be equal – men, women and children – and he believed that a communist society without private property would ensure this. He felt that relations between the sexes and relations between parents and children were corrupted by wage labour and private property. In The Communist Manifesto he wrote, ‘All family ties between the proletariat are torn asunder, children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.’

  Class divisions at that time meant that men, women and children from the working class laboured for long hours in factories and mines. They had few opportunities for health care or education. Women in the middle classes did not work outside the home after marriage and it was not always seen as necessary to educate girls. Marx believed that marriage could never be an equal partnership when women were treated as second-class citizens and men were seen as the head of the household, for this stopped women from reaching their true potential as individuals.