by Gill Hands
In his early years, Marx believed that revolution would:
• begin in the industrialized capitalist countries of Europe such as Britain and Prussia
• spread rapidly around the rest of the world because of the way in which countries had become economically dependent on each other.
However, he did amend some of his ideas later in his life, which is why he was not totally wrong in predicting the future, for the first communist revolution was in Russia, a country based on a peasant economy. It remained the only communist country for nearly 30 years. Not long before his death, he saw that perhaps a revolution in Russia might occur in conjunction with one in Europe and could succeed because there was already a system of common ownership of land in place, and at the time of the Russian Revolution industrialization was beginning to expand rapidly.
Marx was disappointed in his lifetime as the predicted revolution did not occur, despite a number of simultaneous strikes and uprisings that happened throughout Europe in 1848. He and Engels became very excited by the bourgeois revolution in Germany that year and predicted it would soon spread, but when this did not materialize he wondered if perhaps the time was not quite right. In later years he predicted that workers might have to go through at least 50 years of struggle before they could change their circumstances, and that this would be a long-term process.
Marx was always against revolutionary terror of the kind that had happened in France and thought it showed immaturity on the part of the participants. For this reason, he was against revolution taking place too soon, when people were not educated enough to take part properly in the process of change.
As a philosopher, Marx saw benefits to the individual from revolution. This is because he believed that people were not really free when they were subject to forces they couldn’t understand. He hoped his writings would help them to realize these forces existed and that they were the products of the human mind. The human mind had created the economy and social structure that oppressed them, not a god or universal mind. When people realized this they would be free to take responsibility for their own actions and change both themselves and the world.
Key ideas
Economic base The way the economy is structured in society.
Philanthropy Practical benevolence.
Productive forces A combination of the means of production, e.g., factories and machinery, with labour power.
Relations of production Relationships between people or between people and things in an economic sense.
Superstructure The laws, culture, customs, religions and government within a society.
Things to remember
• Marx spent years refining his theories on the dialectical view of history and the development of the economy.
• He believed that society was always dominated by a ruling elite that controlled the means of production and the surplus products of the workers.
• He saw the history of society as a series of dialectical conflicts. Societies were continually destroyed by internal contradictions and then replaced.
• The capitalist system was the latest form of exploitation in a series of oppressive rules through history.
• The state was not an independent body but a tool that capitalists used to oppress the workers.
• Because the proletariat and bourgeoisie could not exist together in a stable society, revolution would be inevitable.
Fact check
1 In Marx’s view who owns the means of production?
a The proletariat
b The bourgeoisie
c The government
d Religious leaders
2 Why did Marx believe the lumpenproletariat were not important to class struggle?
a Because they were not being directly exploited by the system
b Because they were lazy
c Because they were uneducated
d Because they worked the land
3 What are ‘productive forces’?
a Material things used to make commodities
b Laws and customs
c Privileges given to the bourgeoisie
d Forces at work in the relations between workers
4 What does the superstructure of society consist of?
a Laws, culture, customs, government and religion
b Profit, economic margins and productive forces
c Physical buildings, architecture and factory premises
d Alienation, fetishism and imperialism
5 Which answer best describes what Marx called a class ‘in itself’?
a A class that is conscious, that has discovered it is alienated
b A class that is ignorant of class struggle
c A sub class of bourgeois society
d A class who share the same relationship to the means of production and share common interests
6 Which answer best describes what Marx called a class ‘for itself’?
a A class that is conscious, that has discovered it is alienated
b A class that is ignorant of class struggle
c A sub class of bourgeois society
d A class who share the same relationship to the means of production and share common interests
7 When did trade unions become legal in the United Kingdom?
a 1871
b 1891
c 1901
d 1899
8 Which answer best describes false consciousness?
a When people do not vote for the government
b When people do not understand the class system
c When there are divisions in the superstructure
d When people do not understand the way their beliefs are artificially constructed by society
Dig deeper
Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, Bookmarks Publications 2004
Dennis L. Dworkin, Class Struggles – History: Concepts, Theories and Practice, Routledge 2006
Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx//works/1884/origin-family/
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
7
Further Marxist thought
In this chapter you will learn:
• what Marx believed might happen after the revolution
• about the dictatorship of the proletariat
• how Marx and Engels thought a communist society might work
• Marx’s views on religion, women’s rights and the family, art and culture, freedom and the individual.
Although Marx wrote a great deal about the way in which the relationship between society and the economy had developed throughout history, he did not write much about how these would develop after the revolution that he had predicted. He believed a classless communist society would be the result of the revolution, but he did not really define how this society might be run. This is hardly surprising as his view of the world was a materialist one; anything that might happen in the future was a supposition and could not be examined. As he believed that the structure of society was based on the economic factors existing at the time, he did not think it possible to predict in advance any details of what that structure would be like. He made a few predictions about what might happen and some of these were influenced by the ideas of the Utopian Socialists and the French communists, although he did not agree with a lot of their more Romantic ideals.
He did not write in detail about the structure of any future communist society, but he thought deeply about the relationships between people within that society. In his writing he looked at the world in a new way and shed new light on the relationships between individuals and the society they lived in. His ideas were considered extremely radical in their day but today we take many of them for granted in Western society; for example, equal rights for men, women and children.
After the revolu
tion
Marx did not write a great deal about the form that society would take after the revolution, or how it would be organized. He believed that society would have to become a communist one in the long term, but there would have to be a transitional phase before this could occur. At first, society would be ‘stamped with the birthmarks’ of the past capitalist society it had emerged from, like a child from the womb.
‘What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.’
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875, Chapter I https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
Marx did not believe that it would be possible to go directly from a capitalist society to a communist one, there would have to be an intermediate stage between the two, known as socialism. Socialism in the Marxist sense is just a descriptive word for the intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. Today the word socialism has become a much less easily defined term, referring to any system where there is state control, planning and ownership of the means of production. There is also some element of social care for the sick, children, the elderly and those in extreme poverty. (Many would argue that those countries that declare themselves to be communist states are actually only at the state of socialism.) It is important that when you read anything on socialism that you understand how the author defines the term in the text.
Under socialism there would be a dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx wrote about this in The Class Struggles in France written for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue in 1850. Here he wrote that, ‘the class dictatorship of the proletariat would be a necessary stage for the “abolition of class distinctions generally”’. He also wrote about dictatorship of the proletariat in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, which 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.
‘Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.’
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875, Chapter IV
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm
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.
Case study: Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, as he is now known, was born in Russia in 1870 to a middle class family. Russia was beginning to develop away from being an isolated feudal empire but the change was terribly slow and intellectuals began to call for more rapid enforced change. Lenin became interested in politics after the execution of his brother, who was implicated in a terrorist plot to assassinate Nicholas III of Russia in 1887. He became a revolutionary Marxist and was a leading figure in the October Revolution of 1917, writing the April Theses. These directives were aimed at fellow Bolsheviks calling for workers’ councils to take power and were essentially a plan for the way the party could take over the country.
Lenin’s personality was volatile, he had a tendency to angry outbursts that he tried to divert into political aggression, he was forceful and totally committed to his own interpretation of the communist ideal. Under his leadership Russia became the first communist state, a one-party state with oppressive government policies, for Lenin believed in firm leadership and he justified dictatorship. Some scholars believe that he was a simply a dictator, but others believe he was a victim of circumstance and was obliged to take a dictatorial role to deal with day-to-day problems in government.
Lenin died in 1924, possibly as a result of syphilis, and he became an iconic figure in the Soviet Union. Statues of him were erected in hundreds of public spaces, although many of these have been removed since the end of communist rule. He is seen as a major figure in the establishment of communism, but there is much controversy over the merits of the philosophy of Leninist thought and the Marxist/Leninist philosophy that developed from it under Stalin. He was a great influence on other revolutionaries including Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro.
Read works by Lenin at http://www.marxists.org/
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 citizen’s 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.
Lenin first put forward the idea of a vanguard party to convert workers to Marxism in his pamphlet published in 1902, What Is to Be Done?, and developed the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat further in The State and Revolution in 1917. 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 Bolsheviks that supported Lenin, were abolished one by one on various trumped-up charges, so that they were the only party that remained. The Bolsheviks were members of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split away from the more moderate Mensheviks in 1903. After Lenin’s death, in-fighting among the Bolsheviks was finally overcome by the iron rule of Stalin. They eventually became the ruling communist party in the Soviet Union. 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.
Spotlight
Lenin’s preserved body has been on show for 90 years. His tomb was refurbished in 2013 as can be seen in this short film. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22547553
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 soc
iety as a whole. Society would be a self-governing community.
Marx and Engels believed society would eventually be stateless because they believed the state was a tool that let one branch of society oppress another.
‘All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society.’
Friedrich Engels, On Authority, 1872
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
After the revolution, the state would ‘wither away’ as there would be no oppression, but it would take time. In order for this to happen, society would need to be more productive with a much shorter working day so that people would have time to participate in running the society. Engels explains more about this in Chapter 2 of Anti-Dühring, written in 1877.
Because Marx believed the ownership of property defines the class system, it was important 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.
