The Meaning of Marxism

By Paul D'Amato

“In [D’Amato’s] able hands, Marxist politics come alive and leap before us, pointing a way toward a better world. It’s a knockout.”—Dave Zirin, author of What’s My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States

In this lively and accessible introduction to the ideas of Karl Marx, with historical and contemporary examples, D’Amato argues that Marx’s ideas of globalization, oppression, and social change are more important than ever.

Paul D’Amato is the associate editor of the International Socialist Review. His writing has appeared in CounterPunch, Socialist Worker, and SelvesandOthers.org. He is an activist based in Chicago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781608460519

Book preview

Contents

Introduction to the 2014 Edition: The Return of Marx

Introduction

Chapter One: From Millenarianism to Marx

Chapter Two: Marx’s Materialist Method

Chapter Three: The Marxist View of History

Chapter Four: Marxist Economics: How Capitalism Works

Chapter Five: Marxist Economics: How Capitalism Fails

Chapter Six: No Power Greater—the Working Class

Chapter Seven: Democracy, Reform, and Revolution

Chapter Eight: From Marx to Lenin: Marxism and Political

Chapter Nine: Russia: The God That Failed?

Chapter Ten: Imperialism, Nationalism, and War

Chapter Eleven: Marxism and Oppression

Chapter Twelve: Capitalism’s Ecological Crisis

Chapter Thirteen: Imagine . . . the Socialist Future

Appendix 1: But What About . . . ? Answers to Common Against Socialist

Appendix 2: Study Questions

Further Reading

Notes

About the Author

© 2014 Paul D’Amato

First published in 2006 by Haymarket Books.This revised and updated edition published in 2014 by

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Introduction to the 2014 Edition

The Return of Marx

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. . . . The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

—Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto

A year or so after this book was first published in 2006, the world was hit by the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, from whose effects millions are still reeling. Modern readers cannot help reading these words above, from a little 1848 pamphlet by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels called The Communist Manifesto, and not have them jump off the page. The crisis reinforces the value of Marxism both as a way of understanding the world we live in and in sensing the urgency of changing it.

When the crisis came, the neoliberal ideology that told us that markets solved everything, crises were avoidable, and governments should keep their hands off business was itself thrown into crisis. Suddenly, capitalists and their mainstream press mouthpieces were extolling the virtues of government intervention—to save capitalism. Once the banks were bailed out, however, the talk faded. Once the banksters had fed at the state trough, it was back to business as usual. No bankers went to jail. Very few new economic regulations to prevent the emergence of new crises were put into place. Deregulation, rampant spoliation of the environment, privatization of everything that moves, drastic cuts in wages, pensions, government services, and entitlements (which, apparently, we’re not really entitled to anymore)—all these processes continued apace. It is apparently the medicine we are meant to take after our tax dollars were appropriated to pay to restore the banking system.

What’s different is that neoliberalism has lost its luster. Nobody believes anymore that a rising tide of corporate profits lifts all boats. More and more people are acutely aware of the fact that the wealth at the top comes at the expense of the labor and health of the vast majority. In spite of decades of media pundits and politicians telling us that we are to blame for our poverty, low wages, and lack of social opportunities, more and more people understand that the system is set up deliberately to benefit a tiny minority.

The signs of dissatisfaction are growing—best exemplified by the fact that the framing introduced by the Occupy Wall Street movement that spread across the country in 2011—the 1 percent versus the 99 percent—is now everywhere. The crisis has produced questioning, disillusionment, and also resistance. A study by the Initiative for Policy Dialogue finds a world wracked by significantly higher levels of protest starting in 2006.1 A 2011 Pew poll found that almost half of young Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine had a favorable view of socialism, and 47 percent a negative view of capitalism.2 While the majority of Americans may not have a clear idea of what socialism is, and despite the history of phobia around the word socialism, it is significant in this country that so many young people are not happy with the way wealth is distributed upward. As author Naomi Klein notes, The fact that the business-as-usual pursuit of profits and growth is destabilizing life on earth is prompting some climate scientists to draw anticapitalist conclusions, and is fueling a growing ecological activism across the planet.3

Not even the mainstream press can ignore these developments. In March 2013, TIME ran a story called Marx’s Revenge: How Class Struggle Is Shaping the World, which commented, With the global economy in a protracted crisis, and workers around the world burdened by joblessness, debt and stagnant incomes, Marx’s biting critique of capitalism—that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive—cannot be so easily dismissed.4 The article continues:

Marx theorized that the capitalist system would inevitably impoverish the masses as the world’s wealth became concentrated in the hands of a greedy few, causing economic crises and heightened conflict between the rich and working classes. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, Marx wrote.

A growing dossier of evidence suggests that he may have been right. It is sadly all too easy to find statistics that show the rich are getting richer while the middle class and poor are not. A September study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington noted that the median annual earnings of a full-time, male worker in the U.S. in 2011, at $48,202, were smaller than in 1973. Between 1983 and 2010, 74% of the gains in wealth in the U.S. went to the richest 5%, while the bottom 60% suffered a decline, the EPI calculated. No wonder some have given the 19th century German philosopher a second look.

Hopefully, this book will help people who want to take a second—or first—look at Marx. I’ve not changed everything. Some if it remains as it was in the first edition. But I have tried throughout, in using modern illustrations to highlight the applicability of Marx, Engels, and other Marxists’ ideas to the present, to update my examples to take into account the changes that have occurred over the past several years. There are some chapters I’ve substantially revised, like the one on Marx’s economics and the chapter on Marxism and oppression, and some I’ve added bits to. There are also chapters I’ve almost completely rewritten, like the chapter on the Marxist views of organization and the one on capitalism and ecology. It makes for a somewhat longer but, I hope, better book.

As someone new to writing a book, I didn’t have any acknowledgements in the first edition. So I figured I’d better include them here. I'd like to thank Anthony Arnove, who gave me helpful guidance and comments on the first edition; Tithi Bhattacharya and Chris Williams, who helped me with parts of the second version; and Phil Gasper, who helped me with both versions. I’d also like to thank the good folks at Haymarket Books, Julie Fain, Anthony Arnove, and Ahmed Shawki in particular, who pushed me to get this second edition done. (Whether it was because I was expanding my mind or just procrastinating I’m not sure, but I constantly felt the urge to read one more book.) I’d also like to thank my wife Bridget Broderick for her insight, friendship, love, and encouragement. Finally, I’d like to thank my cats, Leon, Lupe, and Felix, meow more than ever. It goes without saying that I didn’t create any of the main ideas in this book myself. Marx and a bunch of other great Marxists did.

Introduction

Every so often—usually after a period of economic instability and crisis that has given way to stabilization and growth—some talking head comes along and declares that Marxism is dead and capitalism is the final form of human fulfillment. As the late socialist author Daniel Singer aptly put it, The purpose of our pundits and preachers is to doom as impossible a radical, fundamental transformation of existing society.1

The most common theme is that socialism has failed to make inroads, especially in the United States, due to the prosperity and social mobility that even the lowliest members of society can experience. On the reefs of roast beef and apple pie, wrote the German writer Werner Sombart in his famous 1906 book Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, socialistic Utopias of every sort are sent to their doom.2 The Depression years of the 1930s made these pro-capitalist ideas harder to swallow, but variations on the argument were dusted off and refurbished during the economic boom after the Second World War. Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology told us that postwar Western prosperity and the rise of Stalinism signaled "the exhaustion of the nineteenth century ideologies, particularly Marxism, as intellectual systems that could claim truth for their views of the world."3

Writers on the left, too, like German radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse, could write, Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the Individuals through the way in which it is organized. . . . Under the conditions of a rising standard of living, non-conformity with the system itself appears to be socially useless, and the more so when it entails tangible economic and political disadvantages and threatens the smooth operation of the whole.4 For Marcuse, whose ideas were typical of a whole generation of post–Second World War left-wing thinkers, working-class struggle was no longer the connecting link between our society and a future socialist society. Workers were either bought off or simply so enmeshed in capitalism, and unable to see beyond it, that they were now part of the problem rather than the solution.5

The mass general strike of ten million French workers in May 1968 offered strong evidence to the contrary, as did a whole period of working-class and student rebellion that spanned the globe in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Poland’s Solidarność in 1980 and the major role played by Black workers in the downfall of apartheid South Africa are two other examples). But those movements receded and capitalism found its footing again, utilizing a period of economic crisis to begin an assault on working-class living standards that has continued unrelentingly to this day. Ideologists once again sprang forward to justify capitalism in its most naked, brutal, free market form.

Then came the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe in 1989–1993. We were told then that the free market and liberal democracy had triumphed over totalitarian systems like fascism and communism. Historian Francis Fukuyama came forward and argued that society had indeed evolved, as Marx argued, from lower to higher forms of human social organization. However, instead of that evolutionary process leading to socialism, Fukuyama argued, liberal free-market capitalism constituted the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution, and the final form of human government; as such, it constituted the end of history.6

In a flush of exuberance, Western pundits waxed lyrically about a new era of endless peace and prosperity. But if this was the end of history, it didn’t seem things were ending all that well. Instead, we entered a world of incessant war, where the United States, as the world’s sole superpower, felt free to throw its military weight around, and did; a world of growing disparities between rich and poor (even in the midst of the economic growth of the 1990s); and a world—as we moved into the twenty-first century—of economic and social instability. It was a world in which the much-touted benefits of free trade and globalization dramatically enriched a very few but left tens of millions in ever-worsening conditions. In short, it seemed like we had returned to the days of the robber barons and sweated labor of the late nineteenth century, only on a more colossally destructive, global scale.

The obscenity of capitalism today is expressed in a few simple facts:

• The combined wealth of the world’s 1,210 billionaires in 2010 (410 of whom were in the United States) was more than half of the total wealth of the 3.1 billion people with a net worth of less than $10,000.7 Between 1982 and 2011, the Forbes 400—the magazine’s list of the world’s richest individuals—increased its combined wealth by a factor of fifteen.8

• More than a third of the world’s people—2.6 billion—live on less than two dollars a day, and 1.44 billion people live on less than one dollar a day.9

The statistics for the United States reveal a society that is certainly rich—but only for a minority:

• The average compensation in 2011 for the CEOs of US companies in the S&P 500 index was $12.94 million. On average, CEOs in that year made 380 times what a production worker made, up from a 107:1 ratio in 1990 and a 42:1 ratio in 1982.10 The compensation package for Walmart CEO Lee Scott Jr. in 2007 was $29.7 million—1,314 times that of the average full-time Walmart employee.11 Two-thirds of US companies paid no income tax between 1998 and 2005.12

• CEO pay increased by 300 percent between 1989 and 2004, whereas wages increased in the same period by only 5 percent (and minimum-wage workers have seen their pay fall 6 percent). If wages had kept up with the percentage increase in CEO pay, in 2004 the average pay for production workers would have been $110,136, instead of $27,460.13

• The top 1 percent of the US households controls 34.5 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the top 10 percent controls two-thirds, whereas the bottom 90 percent controls 26.9 percent. The average income of the top 0.1 percent of the households is $23.8 million; for the bottom 90 percent it is $29,800.14

• 46.2 million people, or 15 percent, live below the poverty line—an increase from 11.3 percent in 2000.15 Twenty-six percent of Blacks live below the poverty line, and 40.9 percent of all households headed by a single mother live below the poverty line.16 The poverty level is set at $21,000 for a four-person household—an absurdly low figure. In truth, millions more live in poverty in the United States than these official numbers indicate.

Poverty is always horrible. It only becomes an obscenity when the material means exist to eliminate it, yet it persists. But the priorities of world capitalism are such that the two things—unimaginable wealth and great misery—exist side by side, the one dependent on the persistence of the other. The priorities of capitalism are starkly revealed by the fact that the per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa is $490, whereas the per capita subsidy for European cows is $913.17 These massive disparities of wealth, moreover, are buttressed by various forms of oppression—national, racial, and sexual—designed to reinforce inequality and maintain the dominance of the many by the few.

These obscenities make the case, if not for Marx and Marxism, then at the very least for some project to change the world. That is why, try as the pundits may to bury him—Marx keeps resurfacing. His ideas are alive because his indictment of capitalism—though first penned in the 1840s—is still confirmed on a daily basis. As the misery worsens, the glaring class divisions give rise to what Marx argued was the motor of historical change—the class struggle. Everywhere around the world, the working class (called the proletariat in Marx’s day)—those whose labor produces society’s abundant wealth in exchange for a pittance—continues to organize, demonstrate, strike, and resist in various ways.

Marx not only exposed the ills of society—many had done so before him—but he revealed how capitalism developed, how it went into crisis, and how it would meet its end. At Marx’s gravesite in 1883, Marx’s friend and lifelong collaborator Frederick Engels said that Marx discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production. Even Marx’s critics sometimes acknowledge that he had brilliant insights into the nature of capitalism. But, Engels continued, Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation.18

Of course, much has changed since Marx’s day. But the essence of capitalism—the exploitation of the many by the few for profit—remains, and wreaks its damage on an ever-expanding scale. The insane anarchy of a world market that can produce enough food to feed everyone but fails to feed the six million children who die every year from malnutrition remains with us.19 The unplanned character of capitalist production, with its incessant drive for profit, has created an environmental crisis that threatens the earth’s inhabitants like a runaway train threatens its passengers. Indeed, many of the trends described by Marx and Engels—the creation of an increasingly interdependent world market; the system’s tendency toward periodic economic crises; increasing productivity and wealth on one side and poverty on the other; the concentration and centralization of capital and the growth of monopolies—give their writings an almost prophetic air.

The task today, set out so long ago by Marx and Engels, also remains the same—to replace competition with association, to build a society in which all wealth is produced and held by its producers in common, and distributed according to human need rather than profit. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.20 Only in such a society can humankind develop its full creative capacities, using our scientific knowledge to enhance lives rather than destroy them.

Moreover, those who loudly applauded the fall of Stalinism left out one important factor: The death of what passed for communism in the East—but what was in reality bureaucratic, state capitalism—paved the way for people to rediscover the real Marxist tradition hidden behind years of distortion in both the East and the West during the Cold War era—that is the tradition of working-class self-emancipation. Far from being dead, therefore, Marxism is experiencing a rebirth.

This book began as a series of articles written for a biweekly column in Socialist Worker newspaper called The Meaning of Marxism. It aims to provide a basic introduction to Marxist ideas, and to show how these ideas remain crucial to our understanding of the world today and the task of changing it.

There is, of course, no substitute for reading Marx and Engels, or the great revolutionary socialists who followed them, such as Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky. I’ve read and reread works such as Marx’s Civil War in France, Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution, Trotsky’s Lessons of October, and Lenin’s State and Revolution, among many others, and each time I reread them I learn something new in light of fresh experiences.21 But, as Lenin said in a postscript to State and Revolution, It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of revolution’ than to write about it.22 Marx and Engels, like Lenin, were not armchair thinkers. First and foremost, they were revolutionaries who fought for a world free of oppression and exploitation. They understood that to change the world, it is necessary to understand how that world works, and to learn from past struggles to distinguish the effective levers for its transformation.

Chapter One

From Millenarianism to Marx

The Dream of a New Society

The idea of socialism is as old as class society itself. So long as there were high priests, kings, lords, nobles, emperors, magistrates, and generals, there were also people who envisioned, and sometimes fought for, a world in which the minority who enriched themselves at the expense of the majority would fall, and the world’s wealth would be held in common and shared by all.

Often, radical ideas were couched in religious form, but their content was nonetheless unmistakable. Grace was among them, because none suffered lack. . . . For they did not give one part and retain another part for themselves. . . . They abolished inequality and lived in great abundance, wrote the patriarch of Constantinople, St. John Chrysostom, in the late fourth century of Christ’s apostles.1

The fourteenth-century English radical preacher John Ball, a leader in the great agrarian rebellion of 1381, sermonized:

If we are all descended from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve, how can the lords say or prove that they are more lords than we are—save they make us dig and till the ground so that they can squander what we produce?

They are clad in velvet and satin, set off with squirrel fur, while we are dressed in poor cloth. . . . They have beautiful residences and manors, while we have the trouble and the work, always in the fields under rain and snow. But it is from us and our labor that everything comes and with which they maintain their pomp.

He concluded that things cannot go well in England nor ever shall until all things are in common and there is neither villein [serf] nor noble, but all of us are of one condition.2

Seeing that the French Revolution of 1789 ended feudal tyranny but not economic inequality between rich and poor, nor the rule of the wealthy, Gracchus Babeuf organized a conspiracy of equals and called for a new revolution to establish a society in which all goods would be held in common storehouses and distributed according to need. Everything will be blended together, he wrote, and on the footing of a perfect equality.3

The United States had its share of early radical movements, thinkers, utopians, and socialists. The American Revolution engendered a radical democratic, pro-labor, and antislavery tradition. For example, Thomas Skidmore, author of The Rights of Man to Property!, wrote in the 1820s, Inasmuch as great wealth is an instrument which is uniformly used to extort from others their property, it ought to be taken away from its possessors on the same principle that a sword or pistol may be wrested from a robber. Skidmore believed that new inventions like the steam engine, though likely to greatly impoverish or destroy the poor, could be beneficial to them on the condition that they lay hold of it and make it their own.4

Emerging industrial capitalism had its insightful critics before Marx. The Swiss economist Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi wrote in the 1830s: Exertion today is separated from its recompense; it is not the same man that first works, and then reposes; but it is because the one works that the other rests.5 Sismondi grasped the essence of all class societies. It is not simply that some are wealthy and others are not. It is the labor of the many that accounts for the wealth of the few.

In the years following the great French Revolution, a group of socialists emerged who came to be known as utopians. The utopian socialists concocted plans and schemes for a rationally organized society. They were brilliant critics of the iniquities of industrial capitalism, which they argued worked against the better part of human nature. The French utopian Charles Fourier, for example, wrote, Social progress and historic changes occur by virtue of the progress of women toward liberty, and decadence of the social order occurs as the result of a decrease in the liberty of women.6

The utopians sought to create islands of social or communal living that would set an example for the rest of the world to follow. Their aim was to convince everyone—including the wealthy—of the superiority of their system. Human reason—the sheer logic of their position—would convince the well born in society to adopt their plans. Indeed, Fourier was actually opposed to revolutionary change from below. For the utopians, the working class was only a suffering class, not a class capable of transforming society by its own actions. Engels put it this way:

The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure fantasies.7

Virtually all of these utopian experiments—many of which were established in the United States in the 1800s—failed. Rather than changing the wider world, the social and economic priorities of the capitalist world changed them. These experiments, though they sometimes offered a glimpse of alternative ways of organizing society, succumbed to the surrounding hostile capitalist environment. Worker-owned cooperatives, by the way, have also faced the same problem as utopian colonies, and for the same reason: you can’t build little islands of socialism in a sea of market capitalism.

Various strands of utopianism remain influential today, often justified on the grounds that such experiments prefigure a better world. The idea that you can create autonomous islands of liberation fails on two counts—first, because the real world finds a way to impinge on, and therefore undermine, the relations that the autonomists try to establish; and second, because they pose no challenge to the capitalist system as a whole by their existence.

He Was a Young Hegelian

Marx and Engels did not start their political lives as socialists. As young, well-to-do German university students, they were drawn to the philosophical youth movement called the Young Hegelians in the late 1830s. Hegel was a highly venerated German philosopher who argued that the course of human history proceeded dialectically, that is, through constant change based on the clash of contradictory ideas, toward the absolute idea. Conservative Hegelians considered the highly repressive and bureaucratic Prussian state to be the embodiment of this absolute idea.

The left Hegelians to which Marx and Engels were attracted, interpreted Hegel’s dialectic as a clash of ideas leading to human freedom. Some of the Young Hegelians spent a great deal of time splitting metaphysical hairs, while others looked to constitutional and democratic reforms. After Prussia’s new king legally barred the Young Hegelians from taking university posts, a job to which Marx had aspired, he became an editor of an important liberal paper, the Cologne Rheinische Zeitung, in 1841, and for the first time moved from the abstract realm of philosophy into the realm of, in his words, material interests and economic questions, such as the theft of wood, free trade, and the conditions of the peasantry.8

In this period he could be described as an extreme democrat. He wrote, for example, that every form of freedom conditions the other, such that if one freedom is taken away, then freedom in general is deprived of any semblance of life.9As editor, Marx saw how laws, for example those against wood theft, were used against the poor on behalf of wealthy forest owners, and that the state did not stand above class interests. He also saw how liberals were the first to desert the struggle and find compromises with the status quo. The liberal backers of the newspaper failed to defend press freedom when the state banned the Rheinische Zeitung in 1843. Marx saw this as an example of the natural impotence of half-hearted liberalism, which fears anything that might threaten its petty interests.10 But he also criticized himself, vowing never to place himself again in a position as he did as an editor, where he would have to engage in bowing and scraping, dodging, and hairsplitting over words, which, he felt, led to self-corruption.11

Marx stood for the fullest democracy, and denounced those who argued that the masses were too immature for it and needed to be kept in swaddling clothes. If we all lie in a cradle, he asked, who is to cradle us? If we are all in jail, who is to be the jail warden?12

For a time, however, he continued to see workers and peasants merely as suffering beings rather than the shapers of their own destiny—for he still saw spirit, or philosophy, as the prime mover of change. He held on to the Hegelian idea that the state could be perfected to represent the whole of society rather than just narrow, bourgeois interests, and that the clash of theories was more important than the crude material struggle.

The cowardly timidity of the German liberals had convinced Marx that the bourgeoisie in Germany was incapable of leading a process of social and political transformation as he believed the bourgeoisie had done in the French Revolution of 1789. So after being fired from the paper and moving to Paris in 1843, he was informed by two inclinations—to see practical struggle, rather than ivory-tower disputes, as the key to social change, and to look for a new class, or social force, that could play the key role in transforming society.

When he first became aware of the socialist and communist ideas that were developing in France, Marx first did not embrace them. He felt that he would first need to delve into and study them carefully before he decided what he thought. They were, he surmised, ideal constructions that bore no relationship to existing conditions and possibilities when what was needed was a way to combine a theoretical understanding of the world with practical participation in struggle:

Nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.13

While in Paris Marx for the first time made contact with the workers’ movement, and was impressed by the French workmen’s nobility of spirit and commitment to the struggle. You would have to attend one of the meetings of the French workers, he wrote to Ludwig Feuerbach in 1844, to appreciate the pure freshness, the nobility which bursts forth from these toil-worn men. . . . It is among these ‘barbarians’ of our civilized society that history is preparing the practical element for the emancipation of mankind.14 He was also influenced by his new friend Engels, who in Britain was witness to the struggles of the country’s rising industrial working class, and before Marx’s own awakening had begun to draw conclusions about the role of workers achieving socialism through their own struggles.

At the end of December, he expressed his new views—that the path to a new society in Germany lay in revolutionary struggle, and that the class capable of carrying it out would be the newly forming working class, the class with radical chains that cannot acheive it own liberation without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society.15

Then, in 1844, he witnessed the first stirrings of mass workers’ protest in Germany, the Silesian weaver’s revolt—a two-day battle between weavers and state militia—which confirmed his views. In a debate with another Hegelian, Arnold Ruge, who criticized the revolt from the sidelines, Marx declared that rather than be a schoolmaster, one must not only study the struggle but also sympathize with it.

A New Kind of Socialism

What made Marx and Engels’s socialism, when they decided to embrace it, different from the utopians was that their socialism (actually, they chose to call themselves communists because communism was associated more closely with the workers’ movement, whereas socialism was more associated with the utopians who stood apart from workers’ struggles) was rooted in real, rather than ideal, conditions. Marx and Engels showed that the desire for and vision of another world wasn’t enough. The utopians, in criticizing existing social relations and proposing elaborate social plans for a better society, simply counterposed what is with what ought to be. But there had to be something that connected the future with the present. The seeds of a future society had to already exist in the soil of the present for it to spring forth. The material conditions and social actors had to exist to make that change both possible and necessary for society to move forward.

Communism is for us, wrote Marx and Engels, "not . . . an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. It is the real movement which abolishes the present state of things."16 The starting point for Marx and Engels, therefore, was not what men say, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. Instead, they wrote, We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real-life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.17

The point was not that it was impossible to have ideas about freedom before the conditions for their realization existed, or that there was a mechanical one-to-one relationship between people’s ideas and their material conditions of life. However, one cannot be liberated, if one is unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. Liberation, Marx and Engels argued, is a historical and not a mental act.18

Socialism, in short, must be more than a good idea. There must be material and social forces created within the framework of capitalism that have the potential to make it a reality. Put crudely, if there isn’t enough food to go around, equality simply means a slow death for everyone—an equality of suffering. Sharing on a sustained basis implies that food is plentiful. Revolutionary change, moreover, comes not from the actions of a few social engineers remolding society but through the actions of masses of people.

Marx and Engels were able to move beyond the utopians for a number of connected reasons. Like other socialists, Marx and Engels saw the tremendous increase in wealth that sprouted up during the rise of industrial capitalism that promised, but did not deliver, a world free of want. But they also witnessed something else: workers’ strikes and demonstrations in Germany, Britain, and France. The working class ceased for them to be only a suffering class and became before their eyes the active agent of its own liberation—the class whose own emancipation could act as the basis for the liberation of all.

This is the central component of Marxism, so we’ll come back to this. But for now a couple of points need to be highlighted. The discovery of the working class was an important breakthrough, because it identified a social force capable, through its own actions, of transforming society. Before this point, there had been, roughly speaking, two views about radical social change, and both saw in the mass of the exploited, at best, a passive element that might aid more enlightened minorities to transform society.19 Marx and Engels had originally held these views, but they broke with them—based on their own observations and experiences of the class struggle itself.

The radical French eighteenth-century materialists, like the utopians, argued that the mass of the people, as products of their social and material conditions, were incapable of getting beyond it. For how can someone molded by his or her environment step outside that environment to change it? What was required, therefore, was an exceptional man, or a group of enlightened men, standing above or outside society—that these philosophers thought enlightened men would change the world was, ironically, proof that they, too, were products of the prevailing circumstances—or even an enlightened despot, who would make change from above. Even radicals such as the French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui saw workers as part of a more or less unconscious mass that could provide muscle, but not leadership, to the revolution, which would be made by a group of conscious conspirators.

Idealist thinkers, who believed that great ideas shaped the material world, held equally elitist theories that relegated the masses to either no role whatsoever in historical change, or to a completely passive role. For the left Hegelians in Germany, for example, of which Marx and Engels were members in the early 1840s, spirit (or ideas or philosophy) was the active element, whereas the material, the mass, was the passive element in social change, if it played any role at all. The point is that most radicals adhered to the great man theory of history—every great event in history was brought about by the great ideas and great actions of great men. French radical nineteenth-century historian Augustin Thierry ridiculed this approach:

It is highly singular that the historians stubbornly refused to attribute any spontaneity or creativity to the masses of people. If an entire people migrates and makes itself a new home, that means, our annalists and poets assert, that some hero has taken it into his head to found a new empire to add luster to his name; if a city is established, it is some prince that has given it life. The people, the citizens, are always material for the thinking of a single individual. Do you really wish to learn who founded an institution and who conceived a social enterprise? Search among those who really needed it; it was to them that the first idea of it, the wish to act, and a considerable part of the execution belonged.20

Historians and poets may write history, but it is great masses of people in motion—in particular, social classes—that make history. Marx came to this conclusion in a series of notes, or theses, he jotted down in 1845. First, he argued that the mechanical, or one-sided, materialists who said that people were products of their circumstances, and that to change people you only had to change their circumstances, inevitably divided society into two parts: the passive majority (who were victims of their circumstances and therefore trapped within them) and a thinking elite that could somehow stand outside society and act on it. Like the famous behavioral scientist B. F. Skinner, who set up various experiments to elicit certain predictable responses from his subjects, this minority would mold the passive majority by changing its circumstances.

The problem with this view is that the special minority who are meant to change things are themselves products of their material environment, so there is no logical reason why they also should not be subject to the same circumstances that constrain everyone else’s behavior—in which case change would be impossible. As Marx put it, The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.21

In criticizing Hegel’s idealism, therefore, Marx did not fall back on the old mechanical, one-sided materialism that presented human history as something that just happens behind the backs of human beings. Rather, as we shall see later in more detail, he presented history as something that is made by people themselves, and, at the same time that historical possibilities are constrained materially in such a way that human will and historical outcome do not coincide.

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism, argued Marx, "is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice."22

To the idealists who argued that conditions didn’t matter, and that only ideas were important, Marx argued that ideas without any connection to the real world were immaterial, and therefore incapable of changing social conditions. The validity of any idea about society could only be tested in practice—the practice of masses of people attempting to change society. The way Marx got around this dilemma was to say that historical change could only be conceived as the self-conscious activity of masses of people; that the oppressed changed their ideas, and their own conditions, by acting on the world to transform it. "The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice."23

Chapter Two

Marx’s Materialist Method

Why Theory Matters

The last thesis that Marx jotted down in 1845 was this: The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it.1 One way to interpret this statement is as an argument against theory. We don’t need theory—that’s for professors and intellectuals who like to debate to no particular end—we just need to fight for what we know is right. You don’t need a weatherman, goes the 1960s Bob Dylan song, to know which way the wind blows.2

While people might declare that ideas about society are a waste of time, they wouldn’t say the same thing about what we call the hard sciences. No one would ever say: Who needs physics? (Except maybe bored high school students.) All of our modern technology—from electricity to airplane engines and computers—was developed on the basis of science.

Scientific theory helps us get beneath the surface appearance of things to understand the underlying laws that govern their behavior. All science would be superfluous, wrote Marx, if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.3 Scientific theories are explanations about why and how things happen that are not apparent through immediate observation. We can’t, for example, know what processes are at work that make water boil simply by observing water boiling.

If we lived on a planet where nothing ever changed, there would be little to do, wrote science writer Carl Sagan. There would be nothing to figure out. There would be no impetus for science. And if we lived in an unpredictable world, where things changed in random or complex ways, we would not be able to figure things out. Again, there would be no such thing as science. But we live in an in-between universe, where things change, but according to patterns, rules, or, as we call them, laws of nature.4

How do we know whether or not a theory is right or wrong? It has to be tested in practice. A scientific theory can be invalidated if examples or results are found that the theory cannot explain. Wrong theories produce bad, if not useless, practical results; or they cannot explain every case they are meant to explain. Indeed, the proof of a scientific theory’s soundness lies, with some exceptions, in its ability to predict behavior, whether practical experiments can reproduce what it predicts will happen, or whether the practical applications developed out of the theory actually work.

That isn’t to say that the application of science is completely neutral. Obviously, the fact that governments and businesses spend more time and money on things like nuclear weaponry and designer drugs than on curing deadly diseases tells us something about the way capitalism shapes scientific inquiry today. Scientific practice is not an objective pursuit that takes place outside of society; it is largely harnessed to the interests of profit-making and military competition between states. Modern science is big business, writes David B. Resnick. Like any other business, science is influenced by economic forces and financial interests.5 Nevertheless, the whole purpose of science, for good or ill, is to assist in changing reality. Scientists, in other words, must be able to interpret the world in order to change it. This holds true, perversely, also with the atomic bomb, if we were to replace change with destroy.

Can there be, however, any talk of science in regard to understanding, or changing, society? Marx’s little quip quoted above about philosophers only interpreting the world when the point is to change it was written as an attack on armchair thinkers, people who talked but did nothing. He didn’t really think that there was no point interpreting the world—rather, he thought that there was no point interpreting the world unless you were trying to change it. Ideas divorced from practice are free to float in the stratosphere, where one is as good as the next—or as useless, as anyone who has been to a graduate-student wine-and-cheese party can attest.

Science can be harnessed to suit the needs of corporations attempting to improve production techniques and outsell their competitors. But we live